The space technology startup Agnikul Cosmos, based in Chennai, has appointed Dr. S. Somanath, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), as an observer on its board. This decision comes just before Mission 02, which aims to test two technologies capable of changing the future of Indian launch services.
The company stated that Mission 02 plans to conduct India's first return of an orbital-class booster. Furthermore, the upper stage will be demonstrated to remain operational in orbit instead of being jettisoned after satellite deployment.
S. Somanath characterized this program as a significant technical milestone for both India and the world. He noted that the concept of a convertible upper stage combined with a domestic semi-cryogenic propulsion system and a 3D-printed engine produced in days represents a coherent and well-founded technical strategy.
Somanath's appointment, who led ISRO during the Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing mission and the Aditya-L1 solar mission, occurs amid the expansion of India's commercial space sector due to reforms opening up more opportunities for private companies.
The Indian National Centre for Promotion and Authorization of Space Activities (IN-SPACe) actively encourages broader private sector participation, and the government has introduced support measures for space startups and private launch services. Agnikul's co-founder and CEO, Srinath Ravichandran, emphasized the importance of this appointment, stating that Dr. Somanath's career 'is largely a story of Indian rocketry.'
Ravichandran added that having Somanath as an observer on the board for Mission 02 means that the team includes someone who personally understands the complexities of booster design, stage recovery, and orbital operations at the highest level.
Globally, reusable launch systems have become a key element of the spaceflight economy. SpaceX has demonstrated the commercial value of returning and reusing Falcon 9 boosters, significantly reducing launch costs through multiple flights. Other companies, such as Blue Origin with New Glenn and Rocket Lab with the planned Neutron rocket, are also working on reusable carriers.
Moin previously noted that SpaceX's understanding of the need for reusability stems from the fact that 'it takes a lot of soul to build something and throw it into the ocean.' Agnikul believes that reusable systems are increasingly becoming an industry requirement, not just a technological advantage.
The startup intends to use a two-stage version of its Agnibaan carrier, which will operate on a 3D-printed semi-cryogenic engine. This engine uses a combination of liquid oxygen and refined kerosene, providing higher efficiency compared to many traditional systems while remaining relatively practical to manufacture.
Moin specified that booster recovery requires 'precision at every level' of engineering, covering propulsion systems, guidance, structures, and avionics, and noted that Somanath's experience in integrating complex launch systems will be valuable in realizing the mission.
This announcement followed Agnikul's participation in the Bharat Innovates 2026 event in France, where the company signed agreements with the Finnish Earth observation company ICEYE and the French aerospace group Safran. According to the company, these partnerships aim to strengthen its international commercial and technological cooperation.
Agnikul was founded at IIT Madras and conducted its first controlled suborbital flight from India's first private launchpad in Sriharikota in 2024.
Chinese companies are implementing humanoids in real-world scenarios to collect data and develop machines capable of performing human tasks, marking an ambitious strategy by the country.
According to Bloomberg, current investment is concentrated on embodied intelligence, a technology that combines robotics and artificial intelligence to create equipment better suited to the physical environment. Examples include a humanoid robotic arm organizing snack packages on a shelf near Beijing, or workers recording simple actions, such as folding sheets or removing pillows from sofas, whose images will be used to refine the robots' AI systems.
This evolution signals a shift in focus for Chinese industry. After gaining attention with the martial arts movements of the Unitree Robotics G1 model, manufacturers have started prioritizing the machines' learning capacity. Giants like Alibaba and Xiaomi, along with sector startups, are creating embodied intelligence models that allow robots to acquire knowledge through physical experiences.
The Chinese approach differs from the American one, where companies use purchased data, simulations, and low-cost labor in countries like India and Vietnam. Chinese manufacturers, on the other hand, seek to place their own robots in authentic situations to generate self-learning.
The presence of industrial robotics in China is already notable. Data cited by Bloomberg indicates that the country installed about 300,000 robots in 2024, compared to approximately 38,000 in the United States. Due to population aging, Beijing sees humanoids as a way to mitigate the impacts of a potential labor shortage. Barclays analysts project that such machines could cover up to 60% of a future personnel deficit.
Several initiatives are underway: the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China plans to introduce 10,000 humanoid robots into factories by the end of the year; investors have already allocated at least 100 billion yuan (equivalent to about 82 billion Brazilian reais) to the sector in 2025, surpassing the amount invested in the previous five years; furthermore, data collection centers are being established to train machines in domestic environments, stores, and assembly lines. Chinese companies intend to use robots in real contexts to accumulate millions of hours of learning experience.
Developing more sophisticated robots demands a vast amount of data. Unlike language models, these machines need to learn complex motor skills, such as handling delicate items or preventing cups from falling. Jacqueline Du, a Goldman Sachs analyst in Hong Kong, reported that leading companies have already achieved about 500,000 hours of collected data.
China has inaugurated 64 data collection centers and has 20 others under construction, replicating scenarios such as supermarkets, offices, factories, and residences. Gan Ruyi, head of algorithms at X Square Robot, emphasized that this is an area where the US does not have an advantage, highlighting that the Chinese capacity to organize workers and deploy machines on a large scale may be a distinctive factor.
In the United States, companies like Tesla, Figure AI, Apptronik, and Agility Robotics are also making progress with tests. Figure AI demonstrated the separation of nearly 60,000 packages in 50 hours of live transmission, achieving a speed close to that of a human worker. However, Chinese companies criticized this test for considering it overly controlled. Ai Wen, project director at Agibot, argued that the Figure demonstration still takes place in a laboratory environment, while Chinese robots are trained directly on production lines. Bloomberg concludes that the future of humanoids will depend on the ability to convert everyday experiences into learning for progressively more autonomous machines.
Research conducted by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) establishes a possible connection between the destruction of a specific asteroid in the main belt and a bombardment event that affected the rocky planets of the inner Solar System approximately 800 million years ago.
The research, published in the arXiv preprint repository, points to the massive fragmentation of the parent body of the Eulalia asteroid as a potential source of this impact shower. Dr. William Bottke, Executive Director of the SwRI's Solar System Science and Exploration Division and also director of the Center for Lunar Origin and Evolution (CLOE) within the SwRI team at NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, is the lead author of this work, conducted in Boulder, Colorado (USA).
Bottke emphasized that the understanding of the role of impacts in the genesis and evolution of life in the solar system is still incomplete. He mentioned that, to date, only the Chicxulub impact, which occurred 66 million years ago, is strongly linked to a specific biological effect: the mass extinction of dinosaurs.
Detecting geological evidence of impacts older than 650 million years on Earth is complicated due to the constant renewal of the Earth's surface, driven by processes such as volcanism and plate tectonics, and eroded by weathering. For this reason, scientists have directed their attention to the Moon, where craters remain preserved.
Previously, researchers had suggested a significant increase in large lunar impacts around 800 million years ago, using the age of lunar craters and the chronological distribution of impact glass materials collected by the Apollo missions. The central challenge was to find and validate a probable source for this peak of impacts.
According to Bottke, his team used dynamic and cosmic forensics models to correlate these impacts with the formation of the Eulalia asteroid family. This occurred when a primitive object, similar to a carbonaceous chondrite, collided with another body. The position of the parent asteroid was crucial, as it disintegrated near the 3:1 mean motion gravitational resonance limit with Jupiter.
This orbital configuration, known as J3:1, describes a situation where an asteroid completes three orbits around the Sun for every one orbit of Jupiter. The J3:1 resonance acts as a gravitational gateway from the asteroid belt, projecting bodies into regions that intercept planetary orbits. Currently, many Near-Earth Asteroids originate from this J3:1 area.
Simulations demonstrated that half of the fragments resulting from the collision reached the J3:1 almost immediately, dispersing debris throughout the inner Solar System and intensifying bombardment on both the Moon and the rocky planets. Additionally, in the subsequent 100 to 150 million years, another 25% of the fragments migrated to the J3:1 resonance due to non-gravitational thermal forces, a phenomenon known as the Yarkovsky effect.
The findings indicate that the fragmentation of Eulalia offers a plausible explanation for the lunar craters dated to about 800 million years ago. The research suggests that for every major impact recorded on the Moon, approximately 20 impacts of equal or greater magnitude occurred on Earth.
Bottke commented that, given that this bombardment peak coincides with a period of general cooling and major transformations in our biosphere, it is attractive to speculate that the first event may have caused the second. Furthermore, on Mars, these impacts could have triggered significant episodes of seismic tremors and are temporally linked to an increase in volcanic activity, illustrating how catastrophic collisions in the main belt can generate long-range consequences for the history of rocky planets.
