Seventh ISS array unfurls on the 100th US spacewalk; Ship 42 static fires done; Russia floats ISS to 2032

Ship 42 — ran two static fires at Starbase on 26 and 27 October — a full-duration burn on all six Raptors, then a single engine lit to imitate a deorbit burn. With Booster 22's 33-engine firing already done, the hardware side of Flight 15 looks complete. Flight 15 is the one you will want to be awake for: Musk says SpaceX will try to catch the Ship as well as the booster, if the regulator allows it, and no Ship catch has ever been attempted. Flight 15 is targeted for November; Flight 14 on 28 September put Starship in orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites. Space.com

ISS extension to 2032 — First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov told the Federation Council that Russia is discussing extending ISS operations to 2032 with its partners; Aviation Week reports those talks are with the US government and imply a 2032 deorbit. The station is currently being flown towards a controlled deorbit in 2030, which is the date every commercial station plan is pinned to. A two-year slip would change that arithmetic for everyone. Russia's own April 2026 schedule had the first modules of its replacement station in orbit by 2030, which the report reads as slipping. Behind The Black

“We are currently discussing with our partners the extension of its operations until 2032”

Blue Moon Mk2 — is now formally part of the revised Artemis III profile: a test article flies to low Earth orbit on New Glenn, Orion rendezvouses with it, and the crew spends two days docked, going inside to check life support, avionics and manual controls before NASA picks a lander for Artemis IV in 2028. It turns Artemis III's Earth-orbit rehearsal into a two-lander audition, and it gives Blue Origin a scored flight test rather than a paper proposal. Dave Limp says all nine modules of the repaired access tower at LC-36A are stacked again; next door at LC-36B, 450 truckloads of concrete went into the first pile-cap pour. NASASpaceflight

Voyager 1 — dropped off the air for about 24 hours on 18–19 October: the Deep Space Network heard nothing on two scheduled passes before the signal returned on 20 October. Engineers have traced part of it to one thruster group switching off and its backups taking over automatically under fault protection. A 49-year-old probe that saves itself is a good outcome, but each fault burns margin on a spacecraft whose power is nearly gone. On 18 November the probe will be one light day away, 16.09 billion miles; the team's goal is to keep it alive to 5 September 2027, its 50th launch anniversary. Behind The Black

Apeiron — is the name Virgin Galactic gave its first Delta-class spaceship on Wednesday, now ferried to Spaceport America. In the same breath the company pushed its return to commercial flights to early Q2 2027, blaming testing of the integrated avionics software. That is the second slip this year — May's target was Q4 2026, August's was February 2027 — and the company has not flown to space since VSS Unity's last mission in June 2024. Virgin held $286M in cash and securities at the end of June, with its Q2 report flagging substantial doubt about continuing to operate; seats are priced at $850k. Payload

Ceres-2 — will fly again soon, Galactic Energy says, on a mission it has named Lifengxing — the first flight since the rocket's debut failed. On 17 January 2026 the first Ceres-2 went wrong after lifting off from Jiuquan; the fault was pinned on too little design margin in the support structure behind a segmented throat insert in a first-stage motor, which wrecked the nozzle. A Chinese commercial launcher coming back from a maiden-flight loss is worth watching, and no date has been given beyond "soon". Ceres-2 is three solid stages with a liquid upper stage, 100 tonnes at liftoff and 1.6 tonnes to a 500 km low orbit. SatNet News

FCC direct-to-device rulemaking — cleared its open meeting on 29 October, proposing up to 482 megahertz of extra spectrum for satellite-to-cellular service and a license-by-rule approach so ordinary handsets need no individual certification. This is the regulatory track Starlink's direct-to-cell business rides on, and it is now colliding head-on with the carriers' counter-push you saw filed this week. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon want 290 megahertz at 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz kept clear of satellites; a 60-day comment window opens once the notice hits the Federal Register. SatNews

Telesat Lightspeed — has lost about three months on its first deployment because MDA Space is late finishing two pathfinder satellites, which costs Telesat the ride it had and sends it hunting a Falcon 9 rideshare around June 2028. Lightspeed is the constellation being pitched as the non-Starlink option for governments, so every quarter of slip matters to that argument. Telesat has 14 dedicated Falcon 9 launches on order, with Space Intel Report putting initial service at March 2028. Space Intel Report

SaxaVord Spaceport — has finalised £60 million of funding — £30 million from the UK Government in September, matched by £30 million from long-standing backer Wild Ventures — to finish building out the site on Unst. It is the UK's only licensed vertical launch site, and the money is what decides whether a first British orbital launch happens from there rather than staying a slide. The cash completes three launch pads, mission management infrastructure and a second integration hangar; the site is approved for up to 30 launches a year, and RFA's first attempt there was postponed. Shetland News

K2 Space Gravitas — lit two 20 kW-class Hall thrusters on its demonstration satellite, measuring 20.6 kW in flight. Hall thrusters ionise propellant and accelerate it electrically, trading thrust for efficiency. Electric propulsion at this power is what lets a heavy satellite haul itself from a cheap drop-off orbit to medium orbit under its own steam, which changes who needs a dedicated launch. The previous on-orbit power record was 4.5 kW, held by the Aerojet BPT-4000; Hall thrusters reach specific impulses above 1,500 seconds against 300–450 for chemical rockets. SatNet News

Argotec — has closed a €50M round led by NUO Space, the space arm of a Milan private equity firm, to lift its factory output from 52 satellites a year to 80 and to speed up integration at its new Florida plant. Europe's smallsat supply side is consolidating around whoever can actually build at rate, and Argotec already has deep-space flight heritage rather than just a brochure. It built the two microsatellites that flew with NASA's DART and Artemis I, and is working on Italy's HEO imaging constellation and ESA's Heliospheric Pioneer. Payload

Reusable Experimental Spacecraft — is on day 264 in orbit, and the China in Space newsletter argues it should come down soon: the two previous missions ran 276 and 266 days. This is an analyst's read, not an announcement — Beijing has said nothing. There is a landing to watch for at Lop Nur in Xinjiang, where all three earlier missions ended, and the tells come first. Nothing points to a landing in the next few days: no manoeuvre into a lower orbit has been tracked and no airspace closures have appeared. The craft released and recovered a small companion satellite twice, most recently by 13 September. China in Space

MMX — JAXA's Martian Moons Exploration probe, launched on an H3 from Tanegashima on 19 October — is written up by Aviation Week as the opening of a five-year effort to study the moons of Mars and bring soil home. It is a useful reframing of a launch you already watched: the interesting part of MMX is the years between departure and the sample arriving back. The piece sits behind Aviation Week's subscription wall, so only the opening lines are readable. Aviation Week