Blue Origin reveals Northstar and a New Glenn third stage; Vulcan cleared for Nov 13; the last ISS array is up

🔥What's hot

🚀Flew

• Long March 2C | Yaogan 51-07 to 09 — lifted off from Xichang at 15:58 UTC on Thursday 5 November with three Yaogan-51 satellites, reaching orbit successfully.

• Falcon 9 | USSF-432 — is now set for Saturday 7 November at 00:46 UTC, with the window running to 04:46 UTC.

• Electron | The Mountain God Rises (iQPS Launch 10) — now carries a time as well as a date: NET Saturday 14 November at 05:30 UTC.

💬What people are saying

📰News

• New Glenn — Blue Origin has moved its return to flight from the end of this year to January 2027, with Dave Limp telling staff in a memo, seen by CNBC, that rebuilding the Cape Canaveral pad ran late, partly on bad summer weather. It arrives the same day as the Northstar and GS3 reveal, and it is the number that actually matters: Amazon's Leo constellation keeps waiting, and Bezos had said last month that December still looked possible. The pad was wrecked by an explosion during a static fire in May, days before 48 Leo satellites were due to fly. IT之家

• Vulcan — United Launch Alliance has cleared Vulcan for its fifth flight at 12:54 p.m. EST (17:54 UTC) on Friday 13 November from Cape Canaveral, carrying Amazon Leo broadband satellites, after nozzle failures on its Northrop Grumman solid boosters marred two of four flights. It is the first Vulcan since 12 February, and Space Force missions stay on hold until everyone sees how the reworked nozzle behaves in flight. Chief executive Mark Peller says three credible causes were identified and mitigated; this is the first of 38 Amazon missions on Vulcan's books. Aviation Week

• IROSA — NASA's Anil Menon and the Canadian Space Agency's Joshua Kutryk spent six hours and 59 minutes outside the International Space Station on Thursday fitting and unrolling the eighth and final roll-out solar array, on power channel 3B. That ends a five-year power upgrade you have watched spacewalk by spacewalk, and takes station electricity off the list of things that could constrain science. Eighteen spacewalks went into the eight arrays since February 2021; generating capacity rises from 160 kilowatts to roughly 215. NASA

• Otter 24C — Starfish Space's first full-size servicing craft is unrecoverable, and the cause is now public: per SatNews, the bus's automatic fault-protection logic shut down the main radio and then stopped the vehicle re-establishing a two-way link. The silence was reported earlier this week; what is new is that the inspection demo died of its own protective software rather than anything to do with flying near another satellite. Otter went up on 1 October as a rideshare for NASA's SSPICY demonstration; Astro Digital is reworking the logic on further Otters in assembly. SpaceWatch.Global

• Chang'e-8 — Robert Zimmerman at Behind The Black reports that Chang'e-8, the south-pole lander once pulled forward to 2029, has been postponed indefinitely, after management of the robotic lunar missions passed in September from the civil space agency to the crewed spaceflight programme. Beijing put its crewed landing timeline on a public slide only days ago; the robotic half of the same plan, which is what builds the research station, is the part now going backwards. Zimmerman writes, unconfirmed, that the lander needs a nuclear RTG power source China does not build and has been trying to buy from Russia. Behind The Black

• CesiumAstro — The Austin maker of phased-array communications payloads closed a $730 million Series D led by Janus Henderson at a valuation above $4.5 billion, and announced Synchronicity, its own planned 737-satellite constellation. Suppliers turning operator is how several of today's constellations began, and a 737-satellite plan is another large block of demand pointed at an already tight launch market. Its first satellite, Element-1, went up in October as one of eight spacecraft, and the company says rides for the other seven are already booked. SpaceNews

• Kosmos 2612 — Two further Russian military satellites are manoeuvring towards the orbital path of ICEYE-X37, weeks after Kosmos 2612 approached ICEYE-X36, coming within roughly one kilometre on 17 October. This is the conduct-in-orbit argument at its sharpest: a commercial radar operator whose imagery Ukraine has used since 2022, and inspection hardware that could be read either way. Analyst Greg Gillinger told Reuters on 5 November it looked like a rehearsal; no attack has been confirmed, and Germany's military space commander cautions that tracking data alone cannot establish intent. Aerospace Global News

  “This is the most aggressive posture I’ve seen Russia take in terms of threatening satellites from another nation.”

• Hera — The European Space Agency's Hera probe is now close enough to the Didymos-Dimorphos pair to return a decent close-up of the system DART struck in 2022. Hera exists to measure what that impact actually did, so the first usable image is the start of the answer rather than a pretty picture. Team members say Didymos's equatorial ridge carries more boulders than expected; ESA says detailed images of both bodies follow on 25 November. Behind The Black

• ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter — A team led by Daniel Mège traced seasonal spikes of hydrogen chloride to narrow young fissures around Alba Mons, reading them as gas escaping from a magma chamber below. It is a spacecraft still earning its keep a decade after launch, and its project scientist calls it the orbiter's biggest result yet. The gas peaks each northern early summer, once the winter ice unsealing the cracks melts; the work appeared in Science Advances on 4 November. NASASpaceflight

• Sentinel-3 Next Generation Topography — OHB has won a €554 million ESA contract to build the first Sentinel-3 Next Generation Topography satellite, the radar-altimetry half of the replacement for Europe's existing Sentinel-3 pair, with an option for a second spacecraft. Copernicus work decides which European primes stay in business, and OHB appears to have taken this one ahead of Airbus, which held the parallel study. The two satellites were tentatively pencilled in for launch in 2033 and 2035, and OHB offered no updated dates. European Spaceflight

• Starship Flight 15 — SpaceX is aiming for Friday 13 November, a target its launch vice-president Kiko Dontchev gave on stage at UP.Summit and Eric Berger reported. Trackers had been carrying NET 30 November, so this pulls the flight forward by more than a fortnight, and it is the flight widely expected to try catching the upper stage. The ship-catch profile is unconfirmed: SpaceX has published neither a mission page nor a launch time, so treat the date as provisional. TeslaNorth

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