Latest issueSunday 8 November 2026 · Issue 47 · 4 min read
Starship Flight 15 plan: both stages caught, 22:45 UTC Friday; AST buys Firefly engines; NASA's Moon Base awards
What's hot
Starlust · 3 days ago
Starship Flight 15
Takeaway: 22:45 UTC on Friday 13 November
SpaceX has released the mission plan for Starship Flight 15: Ship 42 flies 14 orbits in about 22 hours at roughly 170 miles up, releases 26 Starlink V3 satellites, then both halves of the rocket come back to Starbase to be taken by the tower arms. The booster has been caught before; the ship never has, and this would also be the first catch of a Super Heavy V3.
This is the flight the year has pointed at. If it works, an orbital-class launch system gets recovered whole for the first time, and for once there is a date and a window you can plan a morning or an evening around. Liftoff opens a 75-minute window at 22:45 UTC on Friday 13 November, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) licence covering the dual catch has not been issued yet.
Flew
Soyuz-2-1b/Fregat | Kosmos (GLONASS) — Flew from Plesetsk Site 43 on Saturday 7 November, set for 16:20 Moscow Time, no official clock given; the Defence Ministry reported a nominal delivery to orbit.
What people are saying
Space.com · yesterday
Isaacman wants a big rocket to the Moon every year
Takeaway: at least once a year
In an interview with Space.com, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency should be flying its Space Launch System (SLS) to deep space at least once a year, and that he cares less right now about whether the landers are ready. He said Artemis III in 2027 will test docking between Orion and the private landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin, with the crewed landing on Artemis IV targeted for 2028.
For anyone following Artemis as a running story, this is the administrator setting a cadence floor in public and, unusually, conceding that China's own end-of-2029 landing date is credible. Asked whether China will pull it off, Isaacman said yes, pointing to its landers, rovers, suits and two-launch architecture.
“But we have that playbook of success, and I think we will prevail.”
Tesla North · yesterday
Musk muses about a 500-tonne-thrust Raptor 4
Takeaway: 500-tonne-thrust Raptor 4
On X on Friday evening, Elon Musk wrote that he is tempted to swap the 250-tonne-thrust Raptor 3 engines on Super Heavy's outer ring for a 500-tonne-thrust Raptor 4. This is unconfirmed as a programme: SpaceX has announced no Raptor 4 effort, no test schedule and no vehicle that would carry it.
Engine thrust is the quiet variable behind every Starship payload claim, so a doubling talked about out loud will be argued over all week. Worth filing as a thought, not a roadmap, until something sits on a test stand. By his own figures it doubles each outer-ring engine only; the centre engines were not part of the idea, and he said nothing about engine count, booster diameter or the catch hardware.
News
Blacklift — the 20-tonne-class rocket AST SpaceMobile unveiled on Friday, meant to loft five of its BlueBird satellites at a time, with Firefly Aerospace licensing it the engines. A satellite operator building its own launcher is the launch crunch made concrete, and first flight is targeted NET late 2028, about two years from a rendering. Firefly supplies 27 Miranda and nine vacuum Vira engines for the first three vehicles; $800 million of the $1.3 billion is upfront, half cash and half Class A stock. Spaceflight Now
Moon Base awards — NASA used its MAX POWER expo at Kennedy to award lunar work: eight companies into CLPS 2, a ten-year cargo-lander pool worth up to $10 billion, and Blue Origin a $94 million base contract to land the nuclear-powered PROMISE rover at the lunar south pole, NET late 2028. Signed contracts rather than architecture charts: this is the kit meant to be sitting on the surface before crews arrive. Six VADR task orders worth roughly $1.3 billion also went to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space; President Trump spoke at the same expo. NASA
Shenzhou-24 — launches to the Chinese station this month, CCTV says, meeting and relieving the Shenzhou-23 crew; aboard is a Pakistani astronaut due to stay about a week, the first foreign astronaut aboard Tiangong. China's crewed programme is carrying a partner nation's flier for the first time, and one seat quietly turns into a year-long stay. One Shenzhou-23 crew member is to remain roughly another six months to reach a year in orbit; two Pakistani candidates were selected, one flying and one as backup. IT之家
ESCAPADE — the first of NASA's twin orbiters swung past Earth and fired its trans-Mars injection burn on Saturday 7 November; the second follows on Monday 9 November. Both craft are finally leaving the Earth-Moon neighbourhood after a year parked at a Lagrange point, and Monday's pass is one you might actually see. The flyby adds over 1,000 mph of speed, with arrivals at Mars on 7 and 9 September 2027; the second orbiter may be visible from the western United States between 1 and 2 am PST on Monday, telescope likely needed. Starlust
NASA astronaut selection — applications opened on Saturday for the next astronaut candidate class, closing at 11:59 pm EST Thursday 3 December, with the final pick expected in late 2027. If you have ever wanted the seat rather than the stream, this is the intake being hired against lunar surface work and the Moon Base. The corps stands at 32 active astronauts; the last round took ten people from a pool topping 8,000, and the floor is US citizenship, a STEM master's or equivalent, and three years of experience. NASA Watch
Starlink V4 — Elon Musk told the Baron Investment Conference on Friday that V4 satellites will be about ten times as capable as V3, with inter-satellite laser links going from roughly 100 Gbps to 10 terabits per second; on X he then floated around 100 lasers per satellite across more than 100,000 spacecraft, enough, he argued, to beat undersea cables. Treat it as ambition: there is no V4 launch date, and his own numbers disagree, ten lasers on stage against about a hundred in writing. Each V3 satellite is designed for about 1 Tbps of downlink. Tesla North
Trump speaks at Kennedy as the lunar contracts land. President Trump addressed aerospace leaders at the Kennedy Space Center on Friday during NASA's MAX POWER expo, the same event at which the agency unveiled its Moon Base awards. It is the setting those contract announcements were staged in, which is worth knowing when you read them. C-SPAN carried the remarks in full from the expo, which showcased aviation, space and emerging technology. Leonard David's Inside Outer Space
“NASA is BACK, and Americans will pioneer the next generation of space”
One takeaway
Watch the tiles, not just the tower arms. A catch means the tower's arms take the vehicle out of the air instead of legs and a pad. SpaceX has done it with the Super Heavy booster three times, on Flights 5, 7 and 8.
The ship is the harder half: it comes home from orbital speed through reentry heating, so the heat shield and the way it is attached have to hold before any flip and grab. Next week's flight carries new tile designs and new attachment techniques to test on the way down. Behind The Black