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On 23–24 May 2026 SpaceX flew its new 124 m-tall Starship V3 for the first time, deploying mock Starlink payloads and then intentionally ditching the vehicle in the Indian Ocean after a 65-minute sub-orbital flight.
After a scrub 24 hours earlier, SpaceX’s upgraded 408-ft Starship V3 (Flight 12) lifted off from Starbase Pad 2 on 22 May 2026, completed a partial-orbital arc, deployed test payloads and splashed both stages down, marking the vehicle’s maiden flight.
China slated the Shenzhou-23 launch for 24 May 2026, adding Hong Kong payload specialist Lai Ka-ying to the crew and confirming that one of the three astronauts will log the nation’s first continuous one-year stay in orbit.
On 22 May 2026, SpaceX successfully launched its upgraded 124-m Starship V3 from Starbase a day after a hydraulic-pin failure halted the countdown at T-40 s.
On 21 May 2026 the Commerce Department signed letters of intent to invest $2.013 billion from the CHIPS Act in nine quantum-computing firms in exchange for non-controlling equity, marking the first time the U.S. has tied federal R&D money for the sector to government ownership positions.
On 22 May 2026, “Operazione Tutto Chiaro” carried out over 100 synchronized raids in Italy, France, and Germany, seizing servers that let the CINEMAGOAL app rebroadcast Sky, DAZN, Netflix and others by cycling fake subscription credentials every three minutes.
Starship Flight 12’s maiden V3 launch was aborted at T-40 seconds on 21 May 2026 after a pad-tower hydraulic pin failed, delaying the long-awaited test to at least the following day.
On 20 May 2026 GitHub revealed that a single poisoned Visual Studio Code plugin on an employee laptop let the TeamPCP supply-chain gang siphon off roughly 3,800 of its private repositories, which the hackers are now offering for at least US $50,000 on underground forums.
On 21 May 2026, only hours before an Oval Office ceremony, President Trump cancelled the signing of an executive order that would have asked AI developers to give the U.S. government and critical-infrastructure firms 90-day pre-release access to their most advanced models for security testing.
On 19 May 2026 a Vega-C rocket from Kourou launched SMILE, the first full ESA–Chinese Academy of Sciences science mission, kicking off a three-year campaign to capture the world’s first global X-ray views of Earth’s magnetic shield.
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