MMX away to Phobos, Starship Flight 15 NET 8 November, and a Chinese upper stage in a Minnesota cornfield

Zhuque-2E — A farmer combining corn in Scott Township, Minnesota, found a circular metal object about 11 feet in diameter, which experts tie to the upper stage of LandSpace's Zhuque-2E, deorbited on 15 September after releasing ten Qianfan satellites. Disposal burns are supposed to end over open ocean, so this reads as one that went wrong over land — and under international law the launching state carries the liability for what it hits. The stage's 3.35-metre diameter matches the object; LandSpace has not publicly acknowledged the incident. Ars Technica

“Upon responding, deputies confirmed that a large, metallic object, approximately 11-feet in diameter, presumably a space object, was present in the cornfield.”

Starship Flight 15 — The next Starship flight is NET 8 November, with static fires still due for Booster 22 and for Ship 42, whose engines were pulled after a cryogenic proof. SpaceX intends to catch both the booster and the Ship, the first attempt at fully recovering a complete vehicle. This is the milestone the Starbase watchers have been waiting on since booster catches became routine, and a clean double catch is what opens the door to reflying a recovered Ship. Flight 16, aimed at December, could be the first Starship launch from Launch Complex 39A; Musk described Flight 14's vacuum Raptor shutdown as a software fault confined to that engine's computer. NASASpaceflight

OSSIE-D — UARX Space says the communications blackout on its first orbital transfer vehicle, launched 1 October on Transporter-18, came from a configuration error in its ground station interface. With no reliable link, the team commanded payload release two days after launch without knowing the command had arrived. A tug that goes quiet on its maiden flight is the sort of failure that decides whether rideshare customers trust small OTVs with their satellites. Communications are nominal again, and ten PocketQubes had been deployed and contacted by their owners as of 15 October, with more payloads still aboard. SpaceNews

Miura 5 — PLD Space has begun system-level testing of its 35.7-metre kerosene and liquid oxygen small launcher, with a fully integrated second stage standing vertical at Teruel for a wet dress rehearsal and a static hot-fire. Manufacturing of the first three vehicles, two qualification units and the flight article, is complete. Of the European Launcher Challenge names, this is one with hardware to point at rather than renders, and the debut is targeted for the first half of 2027 from Kourou. Around 60 containers of ground equipment have reached French Guiana; the company has put €42.7 million into 493 domestic suppliers. NASASpaceflight

Station spacewalk dates firm up, first on 29 October. NASA's Anil Menon and CSA's Joshua Kutryk will install a roll-out solar array on the port truss on 29 October, then the station's eighth and final array on the starboard side on 5 November. NASA previews both at a Johnson Space Center news conference at 2 p.m. EDT (18:00 UTC) Tuesday. It is Kutryk's first spacewalk and Menon's fourth, and it closes out the array upgrade that has been running across several crews. Menon cleaned the suits' cooling loops on Monday while Kutryk refilled the tanks and cooling garments with water. NASA

Infinite Orbits — The French in-orbit servicing firm, founded in 2017 and working on geostationary rendezvous, proximity operations and docking, has raised €52 million ($58.4 million) across two rounds and reports a firm order backlog above €150 million, with French Space Command, SES and Eutelsat among its customers. Servicing companies live or die on whether they actually have rides booked, and four firm launch contracts is an unusual amount of certainty for a company this size. The flights are on Impulse Space orbital transfer vehicles riding Falcon 9 through 2029. Space Intel Report

LandTower Intelligence — The operator behind the Guangchuan-03 and -04 optical-communications satellites flown on the last Zhuque-2E turns out to be closely tied to the rocket company: LandSpace holds about 31% of its shares, the largest single stake, and LandSpace chief executive Zhang Changwu chairs it. A Chinese launch firm building its own satellite customer is the vertical-integration pattern that reshapes who buys rides in a crowded constellation market. LandTower was founded in April 2025 with around 161 million yuan in registered capital and is approved to develop and build small satellites in Beijing, Chengdu and Nanjing. China in Space

Inspector general picks apart the decadal survey process. A new NASA Office of Inspector General report says the agency's hands-off stance and the National Academies' rigid timetable leave almost no room for feedback: a survey takes about two years to write, and NASA gets less than 10 days to review the prepublication report. Eight recommendations follow. Decadal surveys set which probes and telescopes get started for a decade, so how they are written matters as much to what flies as any budget line. The latest biological and physical sciences survey proposed campaigns costing $100 million to $400 million a year against the division's $85 million fiscal 2023 budget. NASA Watch