Starship Flight 15 now NET Nov. 12; NVS-03 in orbit; Quilty's 150-launch hole; NASA asks who can save Hubble

Hubble reboost RFI — a request for information, out Thursday with answers due Nov. 30, asking companies how they would grab the telescope and raise it to at least 600 km, improve it, or steer it to a controlled reentry. NASA has no money set aside and says any mission must not damage the observatory and should fly by 2032. Left alone Hubble reenters around 2033 or 2034, so this is the real deadline clock on a working telescope, and it comes straight after the Swift rescue failed. Katalyst got $30 million and nine months for Swift, flew, then stopped roughly 10 km away after power and control trouble. Ars Technica

Voyager 1 — NASA now says a thruster group dropped offline and its backups came up automatically, the spacecraft's fault protection doing what it is built to do, which is why two tracking passes heard nothing before the signal returned on Oct. 20. Engineers are still working out the cause. It closes the loop on the silence you read about last week, and it says the 49-year-old probe is still handling its own emergencies. September's power swap, nicknamed the Big Bang, replaced three devices with lower-draw ones; the probe loses about 4 watts a year as its plutonium decays. NASA Science

US spacewalk 100 — Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk were outside for 7 hours and 11 minutes on Oct. 29 bolting the seventh roll-out array onto the 2A power channel, then ran ahead on prep tasks for the eighth and last array, due on the 3B channel on Thursday, Nov. 5. After that walk the decade-long power augmentation is finished, and the extra margin is what supports a safe controlled deorbit later. The array weighs 750 pounds; the full set lifts station generation from 160 kilowatts to roughly 215. NASA

Bharatiya Antariksh Station — ISRO's project head K. Kalpana laid out the plan at a science conference: 54 tonnes across five modules at 450 km, 100 cubic metres of habitable volume, 60 kilowatts of power, and three to four long-stay crew plus short-term visitors. It is the first detailed public shape of the third crewed station programme, and the dates give you something to hold ISRO to alongside Gaganyaan. The first module, BAS-01, is planned for launch in June 2028 on an approved budget of about $185 million, with assembly finished in 2035. IT之家

Xingtu-1 — a lunar lander from Starpath, a Beijing firm founded only in February, which CAS Space says it expects to send Moonward on the three-core Kinetica-2 with its Kinastra upper stage. The plan is to survey the surface for signs of helium-3 from orbit, then try a soft landing. No date has been given. China's commercial sector is starting to build the pieces of something like CLPS, below the state Chang'e and Lanyue programmes. The lander passed a feasibility review in late September; Kinetica-1 cannot leave Earth orbit, hence the bigger rocket. China in Space

Callisto — CNES has begun ground qualification for the small reusable demonstrator at the Guiana Space Centre, using a full-scale mockup from CIPAL erected at the old Diamant pad. This week's campaign is checking the radio link between the base and the vehicle, especially for the descent. With Themis stuck waiting on weather, Callisto is the other European landing-legs programme worth tracking, and ground kit is usually the quiet long pole. DLR said in August that the first flight is expected in 2027; ground testing itself runs into 2027. European Spaceflight

EU Space Act — the Irish presidency of the EU Council released a fresh draft on Oct. 29, superseding the Cypriot text of March 30. Commerce, State and others across the US government are going through it, and the Office of Space Commerce is asking American operators to send comments or proposed redlines by email. This is the law that will set debris, cybersecurity and authorisation rules for anyone flying satellites over Europe, and the redline stage is where it gets shaped. Feedback goes to [email protected]. Office of Space Commerce

MDA Space — the Canadian manufacturer has won work from Thales Alenia Space on Europe's IRIS² secure communications constellation, supplying digital antenna subsystems for 66 low Earth orbit satellites. IRIS² is Europe's answer to sovereign broadband, and each supplier picked tells you how much of it is actually being built in Europe. The contract covers antenna subsystems for 66 spacecraft. Aviation Week

CHAPEA 2 — NASA's second year-long Mars surface simulation ends on Saturday at Johnson Space Center, when the hatch of the 3D-printed habitat opens at 19:00 UTC (3 p.m. EDT) for a ceremony welcoming the four crew back. It is the ground half of long-duration human spaceflight: isolation, delayed comms and resource limits, run for longer than most ISS increments. The crew spent 378 days inside. Aviation Week