A house newsletter · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Saturday 7 November 2026 · Issue 46 · 5 min read
Ceres-2 flies again, USSF-432 up from Vandenberg, Flight 15 waits on an FAA signature, AST builds its own rocket
What's hot
NASASpaceflight · yesterday
Flight 15 waits on one FAA paper: the ship catch
Takeaway: NET Friday 13 November
Booster 22 and Ship 42 have each fired their engines on the stand and gone back to the production site for final checks, and an air-traffic planning slide now shows Starship Flight 15 at NET Friday 13 November, one day later than before. Elon Musk has said SpaceX will try to bring both stages home to the tower at Starbase Pad 2. The missing piece is a licence modification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) covering the ship's return, which overflies populated ground on the way in.
This is your running story, and for once the long pole is a signature rather than hardware. Whether you watch a ship come down onto the arms or another water landing is decided in a regulator's office, not at Massey's. NSF understands the profile runs about a day in orbit, some 15 to 16 laps, against Flight 14's three hours and change; the boil-off numbers feed the ship-to-ship propellant transfer demo NASA's milestone chart now shows in the first quarter of 2027.
Flew
Ceres-2 Y3 — Off from Launch Area 95 at Jiuquan on Friday 6 November at 23:37 UTC with four customer satellites, all delivered to sun-synchronous orbit.
Falcon 9 / USSF-432 — Away from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Saturday 7 November at 00:48 UTC; booster 1095 landed on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You on its eighth flight.
Mir demo flight — Slipped by a day on the schedule, now NET Wednesday 11 November at 05:00 UTC.
What people are saying
Ars Technica · yesterday
Berger: AST's 2028 date ignores the historical record
Takeaway: 4.7 years
Eric Berger at Ars Technica pulled apart AST SpaceMobile's plan to be launching commercially on its own rocket in late 2028. Buying Firefly's engines shaves a year or two off the work, he argues, not five: the fastest any commercial firm has gone from announcing a medium-lift rocket to orbit is SpaceX with Falcon 9, at 4.7 years, and that team already had Merlin and Falcon 1 behind it.
You will see Blacklift turn up on launch schedules within months. This is the measure of how much salt to take with it, from the reporter who has been tracking the launch shortage all year. Of the US medium- and heavy-lift vehicles announced since 2015, only ULA's Vulcan has reached orbit, 8.7 years after announcement. Berger also asks why the rocket is needed at all, when AST says outside providers already cover more than 100 BlueBird satellites across 2027 and 2028.
Payload · yesterday
Op-ed: Russia went antenna-shopping, not posturing
Takeaway: more than 70 near-identical radars
Writing in Payload, Daniel Molland of the UK firm Shield Space argues the close pass of Russia's Kosmos 2612 by the radar satellite ICEYE-X36 was reconnaissance with a purpose: get near enough to characterise the antenna, because the numbers needed to beat the radar's own defences cannot be read off intercepted pulses from the ground. The payoff, he says, is a jammer or a spoofer working through the radar's weak off-axis lobes. This is one analyst's reading, not a confirmed account.
You followed the approach itself last week. This is the first serious attempt to answer the question the imagery could not: why Russia spent five satellites and five months of propellant on one target. ICEYE flies more than 70 near-identical radars, so a countermeasure built against one would likely bite much of the constellation; Molland expects Russia to field something within 12 months. US undersecretary of state Thomas DiNanno has said the satellite operated dangerously close to X36.
News
Shenzhou-24 — will carry a Pakistani payload specialist, the first non-Chinese crew member to visit the Tiangong station, China's human spaceflight office announced. He is due to come home early, aboard Shenzhou-23, after a short stay running Pakistani experiments. A first for the Chinese programme, and a crew rotation with an unusual cross-return to keep track of. Shenzhou-24 is expected to launch from Jiuquan at the end of November 2026; two Pakistani air force pilots were picked as candidates in April 2026. IT之家
Blacklift — is the reusable rocket AST SpaceMobile says it will build to loft its own direct-to-phone satellites, 20 tonnes to low Earth orbit and up to five BlueBirds a flight, with a first launch targeted in late 2028. A satcom operator deciding to become a launch company is the clearest symptom yet of how tight rides to orbit have become. Firefly Aerospace supplies Miranda and Vira engines, 36 of them for the first three vehicles, under commitments totalling $1.3 billion; the rocket is due to be unveiled at an event on 12 November. Payload
“The Blacklift rocket is the springboard to significantly expand our total addressable market, providing AST SpaceMobile with regular unconstrained access to orbit”
Long March 9 — got central government approval in October to move from study into development, in two shapes: a three-stage vehicle with a reusable first stage, 50 tonnes to a translunar trajectory, aiming at a 2030 debut, and the fully reusable two-stage Long March 9B, up to 150 tonnes to low Earth orbit, in 2032. China's heavy-lift answer to Starship now has money behind it, and the dates sit after its crewed landing target. Thirty YF-215 methalox engines power the reusable first stage, 6,000 tons of thrust in total, on a vehicle over 110 metres tall. China in Space
Stoke Space — may now survey the plot just north of its pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the old LC-15 ground, after the Space Force's Eastern Range unit granted it entry for engineering, environmental and survey work toward a second Nova pad. A paperwork step, but it lands in the same week the company's first flight hardware went on the road, so the Nova programme is worth watching again. Eric Berger reported the first flight booster left Washington on Wednesday 4 November for Florida; Nova Pathfinder, with seven Zenith engines below, is aimed at around the middle of 2027. NASASpaceflight
Launch the North — is the line in Canada's 2026 budget that is being widened into a plan for a home-grown medium-lift launcher, a national propulsion industry and government launch and test sites. The defence ministry holds it, and money goes to Canadian firms in competitive tranches tied to milestones. Another country deciding it wants its own ride to orbit rather than buying one, which is the week's recurring theme. The budget sets out $2.7 billion over five years for defence and technology development, with launch only one claim on it. Behind The Black
Avio STS programme — has been trimmed: Avio and the European Space Agency (ESA) agreed to reduce the scope and the money for the two demonstrators meant to prove the MR10 and MR60 methalox engines, after the work turned out harder than planned. Europe's reusable-launch effort keeps sliding, with Callisto and Themis already years late, and this one was contracted to fly by November 2026. The programme was awarded €217.5 million in June 2022; roughly €101.1 million had been spent, per the OpenPNRR monitoring platform. European Spaceflight
“This program saw certain technical difficulties arise in connection with the development activities, which proved to be more complex than expected”
Prometheus — is the low-cost reusable engine ArianeGroup is developing for Europe's future boosters, and it has entered a fresh round of trials, with a hot fire on 29 October. Every European reusable-booster plan, hoppers included, runs through this engine, so test activity is the honest measure of progress. The firing took place on the P5 bench at the German Aerospace Center's site in Lampoldshausen. Aviation Week
One takeaway
Discount every 2028 rocket date you read this month. Three items today are one story: a satellite operator buying engines, a government budgeting for its own launcher, a startup eyeing a second pad. Rides to orbit are scarce enough that customers are turning into builders. Ars Technica's survey of comparable US programmes puts five to nine years between announcing a medium-lift rocket and reaching orbit, and most of those firms had flown something smaller first. Treat a 2028 debut as the earliest optimistic case, not a schedule. Ars Technica