Roberts Road could triple; Starbase static fire Sunday; PhilSA flags Long March 8A debris zones

PhilSA — the Philippine Space Agency says the stages from Sunday's Long March 8A were expected to drop into two zones, one inside the Philippine exclusive economic zone about 107 nautical miles from Patag Island, the other in Philippine archipelagic waters 42 nautical miles from Tubbataha Reef. It has again asked for regional coordination on rocket debris. Every Hainan launch to this inclination drops hardware the same way, so this is a standing argument about notification rather than a one-off, and it is the part of China's broadband build-out its neighbours see. PhilSA timed the liftoff at about 10:03 local from the Hainan commercial spaceport, which is 02:03 UTC. SatNet News

SpaceX — Musk posted on X that the company has closed a $40 billion debt raise to buy graphics processors due for delivery in the first and second quarters of 2027, after a week of reports that widening credit spreads were making the deal harder to place. Most of it is said to be prepayable, with the borrowing routed through a special-purpose vehicle to keep it off the balance sheet. This is launch and Starlink cash flow being levered into compute, and the scale of it is the backdrop to every Starship and Starlink spending decision from here. Third-quarter revenue was $14.575 billion, up 161 percent year on year, with net profit of $4.404 billion; the riskiest slice of the debt was reported pricing near 8.3 percent. SatNet News

Telesat Lightspeed — the Canadian operator plans to offer its low-orbit broadband network to Ukraine as a substitute for Starlink, with service reported to begin in early 2028. The trigger, as reported, was Washington temporarily restricting Ukrainian use of Starshield, which pushed allies to reconsider leaning on one American constellation. It is one more customer pulled toward a non-SpaceX constellation, and Lightspeed's order book is what decides whether those satellites actually get built and launched. Early 2028 is the stated start of operations, which is a long way from Starlink service today. SatNet News

Jinkong Technology — a space robotics company founded by Shanghai Jiao Tong University professor He Jun has closed an angel round of tens of millions of yuan led by CDH VGC, with the money going to core components, on-orbit demonstration and getting products to production. Its controllers, servo drives and joint modules have finished environmental testing. Satellite servicing keeps being promised and rarely flown, so the thing to watch is the flight date, not the funding. It plans an on-orbit trial aboard a computing satellite by the end of 2026, then a robot called Jinkong-1 in orbit by mid-2027 to try tool changes and connector mating. SatNet News

Competition Model 2.0 — NASA's science chief Nicky Fox holds a public virtual town hall today, Monday, from 18:00 to 19:00 UTC, to walk through the agency's rewritten process for competing science missions: judge the science first, and leave detailed engineering, cost and implementation work until a decision actually needs it. This is the pipeline that decides which probes and landers you will be watching launch in the 2030s, and the two-step process it replaces is the one everyone blamed for years of delay. The session runs 2:00–3:00 pm US Eastern, and the joining link sits in Fox's blog post. SpacePolicyOnline

Von Braun Space Exploration Symposium — the American Astronautical Society's conference opens today at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, next door to Marshall Space Flight Center, under the heading of accelerating exploration, with NASA and industry speakers and a paid virtual option. Both human landing system contractors are on the stage this afternoon, which is where unscripted schedule talk tends to come out. The Artemis III and Beyond panel includes speakers from Blue Origin and SpaceX; Artemis III, set for next year, rehearses the landers in Earth orbit, with surface landings planned for 2028. SpacePolicyOnline

US spacewalk, Menon and Kutryk — NASA's Anil Menon and Canada's Joshua Kutryk go outside the International Space Station on Thursday 29 October. Hatch open is scheduled for 12:00 UTC, with NASA's coverage starting an hour and a half earlier at 10:30 UTC. It is the first of the pair of array walks the crew has been rehearsing for a fortnight, and it is the one event this week worth building a morning around. The schedule is listed as 8:00 am US Eastern, with coverage from 6:30 am; North America has not changed its clocks yet, so Eastern is still UTC minus four. SpacePolicyOnline