“With wildfires burning north-west of Athens, Greece is testing whether a new fleet of thermal satellites can give firefighters earlier warning and a clearer view of the blazes that are becoming harder to contain in a warming climate.

The Hellenic Fire System, a constellation of four compact, low-flying thermal satellites, transmitted its first images to Earth in June. The system is due to become fully functional in September, with firefighters still being trained to use it.

But it is already providing data to authorities, including about devastating fires that ripped across popular Greek island resorts and the region of Attica near Athens in recent weeks.”

From Financial Times.

“A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying three of AST SpaceMobile's massive direct-to-cell BlueBird satellites launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3:50 a.m. EDT (0650 GMT) on Wednesday, minutes after the opening of its 96-minute window.

Today's launch further expands AST SpaceMobile's constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO), which will beam internet service directly to unmodified smartphones once operational.

The newcomers bring the total number of BlueBird spacecraft launched to 13 and marks a significant milestone toward getting the constellation fully up and running, according to AST SpaceMobile.”

From Space.com.

“Starlink has enjoyed a robust expansion in recent years, with subscribers rising to 8.9 million by the end of 2025. The subscriber count jumped almost 16% between then and the end of March. The latest tally represents a 17% gain from that quarter.

Revenue per Starlink subscriber during the latest quarter held steady at $66 from the first three months of 2026, though it was down from $85 per subscriber for the year-earlier period. The company has said it expects this measurement to decline as it signs up customers outside of North America and adds lower-priced service plans.”

From Wall Street Journal.

“In the wee hours of 31 May 2025, billions of tons of charged particles erupted from the Sun and began to hurtle in our direction. Spacecraft tracked the liftoff of that huge burst of plasma, enabling U.S. officials to predict when the eruption would strike Earth, within a 12-hour window. But a new view of the Sun’s roiling outer atmosphere could have enabled scientists to peg the solar storm’s arrival time much more precisely—to within just half an hour.

That precision comes from PUNCH, a NASA mission keeping an eye on a part of space that’s been a blind spot for space weather. Like a sensitive 3D camera whose field of view covers half the sky, it watches everything escaping the Sun’s atmosphere and traveling toward us. 'We can track space weather all the way across the inner Solar System,' says Craig DeForest, the mission’s principal investigator.

He and his colleagues have now shown that based on those observations, they could have forecast within minutes when the 2025 storm would have struck Earth’s magnetic field, threatening satellites, power grids, and other technologies.”

From Science.