Blue Origin plans 100+ Florida flights a year; MMX flies Monday; a new pad at Taiyuan

Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center — high-resolution imagery from September and a shipbuilder's own announcements point to a flame trench, foundations and a tower going up a few hundred metres from Launch Complex 16. Wuchang Shipbuilding Heavy Industry Group, contracted in June for a lifting and rotating arm there, has said plainly the work is a new launch pad, and that the arm is built to be adaptable to different vehicles. China's inland sites rarely get announced in advance, so this is the kind of detail that tells you months early where a vehicle will fly from. The likely user is the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, possibly with the Long March 12 family, which has flown from Wenchang and Jiuquan but never from Taiyuan. China in Space

Stephen Cash — named by administrator Jared Isaacman to run Marshall Space Flight Center from Monday 19 October, taking over from Rae Ann Meyer, who has been acting director since September 2025 and goes back to deputy. Cash joined Marshall in 1982, spent 34 years at the agency, ran shuttle propulsion and then its safety and mission assurance directorate until retiring in 2016. Marshall builds the SLS rocket and manages the Human Landing System programme, so whoever sits in that chair sits inside the Artemis schedule. The centre employs more than 5,000 civil servants and contractors. NASA

“Steve Cash is a Marshall legend, has spent his career around the hardware, the people”

CRS-35 — Anil Menon ran the leak checks and opened the hatch after Thursday's automatic docking to Harmony's space-facing port, with Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney and Joshua Kutryk following him in. Frozen samples went straight into station freezers; the experiments coming online include artificial retinas, heart tissue growth and protein crystals for cancer drugs. This is the delivery that sets up the next two spacewalks, and it leaves the station unusually busy with five vehicles attached. Dragon brought over 6,300 pounds of cargo plus two roll-out solar arrays in its trunk; Menon and Kutryk finish installing them on spacewalks on 29 October and 5 November. NASA

More than 4,000 satellite filings are stuck in the ITU queue. Space Intel Report says the International Telecommunication Union's Space Services Department is sitting on a backlog of over 4,000 satellite network filings, with reviews now running a year or more behind. The ITU is the 194-nation UN body that hands out the spectrum and orbital slots any constellation needs before it can operate. Every constellation you read about here — Amazon Leo, Astralink, the Chinese megaconstellations — passes through this queue first, and a year of delay is a year of a business plan. The piece is by Peter B. de Selding and only the opening is outside the paywall. Space Intel Report

UK sets July 2027 for its debris radar award. The UK Space Agency expects to award a £25 million contract on 16 July 2027 for a high-power radar to track satellites and debris in low Earth orbit, to be installed somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere that has been picked but not named. A single £30 million buy was split in two after talking to industry, leaving a separate £5 million job for site works. Britain keeps announcing debris work; this one is the sensor that would actually see the junk, and it is still nine months from a signature. Once running it should spot objects around five centimetres across at 1,000 kilometres and generate at least 10,000 tracks a day; work starts 1 August 2027 and can run to March 2032. European Spaceflight

RATLOG — a heavy-lift hopeful out of Dresden, now in Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch, pitching an engine with no turbopump at all: the whole engine rotates to build chamber pressure, which the founders say removes about 90 percent of an engine's parts. Turbopumps are complex and a classic cause of launch failures, which is the argument. A genuinely new entrant in Europe is worth a line, with the caveat that nothing has flown and the schedule is a founder's schedule. A €30,000 German government grant in April paid for a first prototype test in early September; a flight-ready engine is targeted for 2027 and a first launch NET 2029 or 2030. Payload