Plus: Space weather postpones New Glenn
By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: China's Shenzhou-20 crew may finally be heading home, space weather postpones a New Glenn launch, SES expands its launch agreement with Relativity Space and more.
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Top Stories
China may be preparing to return astronauts from its Tiangong space station after a delay caused by orbital debris concerns. Airspace notices are in place Friday morning over a region of Inner Mongolia that has been used for Shenzhou landings since 2021. That suggests that China is planning to return the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft from Tiangong, although there has been no formal announcement yet from Chinese agencies. Shenzhou-20 was scheduled to return with its three-person crew from Tiangong last week after six months there, but China postponed the return after reporting potential damage to the spacecraft from an orbital debris strike. China has provided few updates since then other than to say it had activated unstated contingency procedures. [SpaceNews]
French smallsat manufacturer U-Space has raised 24 million euros ($27.8 million) to expand production. The company announced a Series A round Wednesday led by Blast's Definvest fund, managed by Bpifrance for France's Ministry of Armed Forces, and Expansion Venture Capital. The Toulouse-based company said it is working to scale up production of satellites to one per week by 2027. The first two satellites designed, built and operated by U-Space launched in March on a SpaceX Transporter rideshare. Another 10 satellites are scheduled to be delivered in the next year. [SpaceNews]
Firefly Aerospace has rescheduled the return-to-flight of its Alpha rocket for around the end of the year. The company announced Wednesday it completed the investigation into the loss of the booster that had been built for the Alpha Flight 7 mission during testing at a company facility in Texas. Firefly said that minute hydrocarbon contamination in a fluid line caused a combustion event in one engine, destroying the stage. The company said it will use the booster that had been built for a following launch for Flight 7, which is now scheduled for late this quarter or early next quarter. That will be the first Alpha launch since a failure in April. [SpaceNews]
SES says it has expanded a launch contract with Relativity Space. The companies announced Wednesday an "extended multi-year, multi-launch" agreement, but disclosed few details. Relativity had announced a launch agreement with Intelsat in 2023, before Intelsat was acquired by SES, and the companies said the expanded agreement includes previously unannounced launches with SES. Relativity Space is developing the Terran R rocket with a reusable first stage to compete with vehicles like the Falcon 9, with a first launch projected for late 2026. The agreement was the first major business update from Relativity since billionaire Eric Schmidt took over as CEO in March. [SpaceNews]
Lux Aeterna is attracting interest from across the U.S. government for heat shield technology designed to make satellites fully reusable. The startup has recently entered Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) with the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command and the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate, as well as a Space Act Agreement with NASA's Ames Research Center. The company says the partnerships reflect rising government interest in its reusable satellite architecture, particularly a novel rigid heat shield that would serve as the spacecraft's structural bus. Its first reusable satellite, Delphi-1, is slated to launch on a reentry mission in early 2027. [SpaceNews]
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Other News
Space weather, rather than terrestrial weather, delayed a Blue Origin New Glenn launch Wednesday. The company called off the launch of the NG-2 mission, carrying NASA's ESCAPADE Mars mission, on Wednesday, citing concerns about the effects of a solar storm on the spacecraft. Blue Origin said late Wednesday it will make another launch attempt Thursday at 2:57 p.m. Eastern. [AP]
The longest federal government shutdown in history is now over. The House passed a spending bill Wednesday that was signed into law Wednesday night by President Donald Trump. The bill provides funding for all of fiscal year 2026 for a few parts of the government, including agriculture and military construction, with the rest funded through January. NASA notified employees Wednesday that it expected to resume normal operations, and have staff who had been furloughed since the beginning of October return to work, on Thursday. [New York Times]
The next Vega launch is planned for late this month. Arianespace said Thursday that it has scheduled a Vega C launch of South Korea's KOMPSAT-7 spacecraft for Nov. 28 from French Guiana. The 2,000-kilogram satellite will provide high-resolution imagery for the South Korean government. This will be the third Vega C launch of the year and one of the last operated by Arianespace before it hands over those responsibilities to Avio. [Arianespace]
The growth in satellites and launches poses risks for the Earth's atmosphere, researchers argue. New research posted to the preprint database ArXiv finds that spacecraft reentering the atmosphere inject a considerable amount of its matter into the mesosphere and lower thermosphere, enough to potentially weaken the Earth's ozone layer. Although more work is needed to explore possible effects on the atmosphere in detail, the associated risk of such "space waste" is substantial, German scientists who led the study claim. [SpaceNews]
Astronomers have observed for the first time a solar storm on another star. Astronomers used observations from a radio telescope along with X-ray observations by ESA's XMM-Newton space telescope to detect a coronal mass ejection (CME) from a red dwarf star about 130 light-years away. The CME is powerful enough that, if any Earth-like planets orbited the star, the burst would have compressed the planet's atmosphere to the surface: "bad news" for any life there, one astronomer said. [Science]
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Love All Your Satellites Equally
| "All Sentinels are like children. They're like your kids: there is no favorite. They're all equally important."
| – Pier Bargellini, program manager for the Copernicus Space Segment at ESA, during a briefing Thursday when asked why the upcoming launch of Sentinel-6B, monitoring sea levels, appeared to be getting less attention than the recent launch of the Sentinel-1D radar-mapping satellite.
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