Booster 22 fires 33 engines for Flight 15; Swift's mission ends; Lijian-2 rolls to the pad

Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — is formally finished: NASA ended the mission in a statement on 23 October after Katalyst's LINK servicer could not grab and boost it, and the telescope should reenter within weeks. This was the first attempt to catch and lift a satellite never built to be serviced, so its failure is a hard data point on whether commercial rescue can be an option for ageing spacecraft. LINK launched on 3 July under a $30 million contract, lost its propulsion and reaction wheels about three weeks later, and got no closer than 12 to 15 km, where it photographed Swift. Swift took its last science data on 20 October. Space.com

Shenzhou-23 — has a little over a month left aboard Tiangong, and one of its three crew will stay on with the two arriving on Shenzhou-24 — a planned uninterrupted year in space. China has not flown a year-long mission before, and the handover is tied to the next crewed launch, which carries a Pakistani visitor for about a week. The agency has not said whether Zhu Yangzhu, Li Jiaying or Zhang Zhiyuan draws the long stay. The crew also ran the fifth external deployment of the exposure experiment module, now holding eight projects and twenty-six sample units. China in Space

Big Iron — is the 86 m stainless vehicle Cowboy Space unveiled on Monday evening, built so the second stage stays up and unfolds into a megawatt-class computing platform instead of being thrown away. Another new entrant whose business case rests on orbital data centres rather than launch itself — and nothing of it has flown, so file the schedule under ambition for now. Once unfolded, each stage is meant to measure 132 m by 73 m and hold five racks of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs in dawn-dusk orbit. The company wants to fly in 2028 and, subject to FCC approval, to build a constellation called Stampede of as many as 20,000 of them. Payload

Lijian-2 Y2 — moved out to its dedicated pad in the Dongfeng commercial launch zone on Monday 26 October, with assembly and testing done and launch set for an unspecified date soon. It is the second flight of China's biggest commercial liquid rocket and the first meant to do bulk constellation deployment, so it is one to keep an eye on this week. Lijian-2 lifts up to 12 tonnes and is China's first common-booster-core design. The first flight, on 30 March, put 4.2 tonnes in orbit. Tencent reports this one carries 18 Qianfan satellites; that payload is not officially confirmed. SatNet News

Nebula-2 — has both of its first-stage tanks delivered — liquid oxygen and kerosene — off the line at Deep Blue Aerospace's Changqing plant, which the company says completes the main body structure. Tanks done means the first-stage propulsion test fire is the next real milestone for China's loudest reusable-rocket challenger, after the Thunder-RS engine's 200-second runs. The tanks are 5 metres across, which the company claims is the largest liquid rocket tank built by a Chinese commercial firm. Nebula-2 is a two-stage reusable design rated for 25 tonnes to LEO and 18 tonnes to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit. SatNet News

KASA — published guidelines letting private operators use the state-run Naro Space Center at Goheung, and secured commercial space firms access to the defence industry mutual aid association's surety and guarantee services. Korean startups had no domestic space insurance and no home pad, which pushed testing and bonding costs abroad; this is the fix, and it lands as Korea builds out its own launch sector. The guarantee route came from a July 2026 amendment to the Defence Industry Development and Support Act, written with DAPA. KASA also settled the ground control site for the seven-satellite Korea Positioning System. SatNews

Katherine Bennell-Pegg — is at the centre of a counteroffer Canberra has put to ESA for a flight to the ISS, most likely on EPIC, the chartered Crew Dragon mission ESA plans for roughly a month in early 2028. It is a rare look at the price of a seat for a country with no human spaceflight programme, and at how unpopular that price can be at home. Science Minister Tim Ayres said Australia's share would be more than $100 million; the #flyKatherine campaign says it has about A$25 million in cash and in-kind pledges. ESA's answer is expected before the end of 2026. European Spaceflight

Astranis — has turned its fourth SpaceX booking into a dedicated Falcon 9 in 2028 carrying its entire Block 4 run: six MicroGEO satellites, injected straight into geostationary orbit by an Impulse Helios upper stage. Direct GEO insertion by a commercial kick stage is the part worth noting — it is Helios doing paid work, and it saves months of electric spiralling for small GEO birds. The flight takes the operator's fleet to 16, on top of ten satellites built across Blocks 1 to 3, and amends a contract first signed with SpaceX in late 2024. SpaceNews

Eutelsat — has started using the Ukraine row as a sales argument: chief executive Jean-François Fallacher says the Starlink and Starshield confusion could not arise with OneWeb, because the company's governance stops a chief executive deciding alone. It is the first big operator to turn the week's argument into a pitch, aimed at governments in Europe, Latin America and Asia, and it comes as Eutelsat says it wants into direct-to-device. Peter B. de Selding reported the comments on 26 October; most of the piece sits behind a subscriber wall. Space Intel Report

ispace — has been picked by JAXA to do conceptual design work on a solar power tower for the Moon, a structure meant to generate electricity for surface operations. Power at the poles is the quiet blocker on every long-duration lunar plan, and this is Japan putting a commercial lander company on the problem. The point of a tower is the polar geometry: sunlight arrives at a shallow angle and local terrain shadows flat arrays. The published announcement gives no contract value or schedule. SpaceWatch.Global