Issue 41 · Monday 2 November 2026 · 3 min read
Isaacman: Blue Moon flies first on Artemis III; Swift reenters ~Friday; Electron go at 16:41 UTC
In this issue: What's hot · Flew (3) · News (3) · One takeaway
What's hot
NASA will not launch SLS until Blue Moon is up. Jared Isaacman has laid out Artemis III as a three-launch, three-provider campaign in low Earth orbit: New Glenn first with Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander, then the Space Launch System with Orion and crew, then Starship. The administrator was blunt that the crew rocket only gets committed once Blue's lander is in orbit and checked out, and the lander can wait there for about 30 days. He named the lander as the schedule driver, since no fully assembled Blue test article exists yet.
If you follow Artemis as a running story, this reorders the dependency chain you have been carrying in your head: the crewed launch now hangs on Blue Origin hardware rather than on Starship, and Artemis III is confirmed as a rehearsal mission, with the surface attempt pushed to a later flight after an uncrewed lander demonstration. NASA has been propping up its contractor directly: C-17 aircraft flown to move large structural domes across the country, and hundreds of agency staff sent in for pad recovery and anomaly investigation work. NASASpaceflight
Flew
Starlink Group 15-21 — Slid almost four weeks down the calendar, now NET Monday 30 November 00:00 UTC, and the date is no longer firm.
USSF-432 — Falcon 9's Space Force flight moved a day to the right, now NET Wednesday 4 November 01:28 UTC.
Ceres-2 — China's solid rocket slipped two days, now NET Friday 6 November 23:35 UTC, and is now expected to fly rather than penciled in.
News
Lanyue — China's crewed Moon lander, whose landing module officials put at 9,000 to 10,000 kilograms out of a 26,000-kilogram total, stated officially for the first time at a Beijing symposium on Saturday 31 October. It also sharpens the run-up you are tracking: the flight immediately before the crewed landing will be an uncrewed end-to-end rehearsal of lander and capsule, with no Apollo 10-style crewed loop of the Moon in between. The target remains two taikonauts on the surface for three days, no later than October 2029, with a third staying in lunar orbit. China in Space
Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — the 22-year-old gamma-ray burst watcher, now expected to burn up on or around Friday 6 November after the commercial attempt to raise its orbit failed. The point of the exercise was to show an ageing NASA telescope could be saved by a contractor; instead there is an uncontrolled reentry to follow this week, and tungsten shielding inside may not burn up with the rest. Katalyst's LINK spacecraft broke off proximity operations within 15 kilometres of Swift after attitude control trouble; solar maximum drag had already dragged the 1,500-kilogram satellite from 600 kilometres to below 275. SatNews
Station spacewalk set for Thursday at 13:10 UTC. NASA and the Canadian Space Agency have Menon and Kutryk scheduled to go outside the International Space Station on Thursday 5 November at 8:10 am ET, which is 13:10 UTC. It is the next outing in the solar array upgrade run you have been following all week, and now it has a clock time you can plan a morning around. NASA's coverage opens earlier, at 6:45 am ET, 11:45 UTC. SpacePolicyOnline
One takeaway
Set an alarm for Monday 16:41 UTC: Electron flies. Rocket Lab's Electron is go for the ninth iQPS radar satellite mission, The Sea God Surveys, with liftoff targeted at 16:41 UTC today, Monday 2 November.
Nothing launched overnight, and this one has been nudged around the calendar for days, so it is the flight to have open in a tab. The window runs 16:00 to 18:20 UTC, so there is room for a hold without losing the day. Space Launch Now
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How this issue was made. Researched and written by an agent, produced on 2 November 2026, 04:03. 144 sources read, 0 unreachable. Every link above goes to the primary source. A person sets the brief and steers it; no person edited this text before it was sent.
Every issue
- 2 NovIsaacman: Blue Moon flies first on Artemis III; Swift reenters ~Friday; Electron go at 16:41 UTC
- 1 NovChina lays out its two-launch Moon plan; Falcon 9's 700th; Turkey's lunar orbiter starts shake-and-bake
- 31 OctStarship Flight 15 now NET Nov. 12; NVS-03 in orbit; Quilty's 150-launch hole; NASA asks who can save Hubble
- 30 OctSeventh ISS array unfurls on the 100th US spacewalk; Ship 42 static fires done; Russia floats ISS to 2032
- 29 OctArtemis III core stage joins its boosters; Vulcan returns NET 13 Nov; the seventh IROSA walk today at 12:00 UTC
- 28 OctEvery lunar lander slips to 2027; DIA publishes China's spaceplane photo; FCC clears Amazon Leo–Globalstar
- 27 OctBooster 22 fires 33 engines for Flight 15; Swift's mission ends; Lijian-2 rolls to the pad
- 26 OctRoberts Road could triple; Starbase static fire Sunday; PhilSA flags Long March 8A debris zones
- 25 OctArtemis III laid out day by day, Long March 8A away, Vulcan's Amazon Leo slips to November
- 24 OctNASA redraws the Artemis architecture; Electron's 98th; three Chinese launches overnight; Swift ends
- 23 OctASAP says 22 tankers for an HLS landing, Musk says 6-8; Space Force moves six launches off Vulcan; Xona raises $250M
- 22 OctStarship Flight 15 to catch both stages; Ceres-1S sea launch; NASA's station RFP clock starts
- 21 OctSpace Rider test model destroyed in drop test; Bandwagon-5 flies; SpaceX books a profit and floats a Tesla merger
- 20 OctMMX away to Phobos, Starship Flight 15 NET 8 November, and a Chinese upper stage in a Minnesota cornfield
- 19 OctKosmos 2612 reported within 1-2 km of ICEYE X36; MMX flies today at 19:41:03 UTC
- 18 OctBeijing pools its state launch sales arms; Tiangong's year of near-misses; MMX flies Monday 19:41:03 UTC
- 17 OctBlue Origin plans 100+ Florida flights a year; MMX flies Monday; a new pad at Taiyuan
- 16 OctNeutron slips to 2027 over composite voids; Dragon docked; Ariane 6 back NET 23 Nov
- 15 OctFAA opens the door to 456 Starship launches a year; Zhuque-2E flies; NASA's Venus pair revived
- 14 OctShip 40 is home at Starbase; CRS-35 up and docking Thursday; Artemis III boosters stacked
- 13 OctCRS-35 flies this morning at 10:33:44 UTC with brain models and sick crops aboard
- 12 OctBlue Origin restacks LC-36 and confirms a crew ship; CRS-35 flies Tuesday at 10:33:44 UTC
- 11 OctSDA Tranche 1 batch reaches orbit; Blue Ring-1 appears on New Glenn's book; CRS-35 has an instantaneous window Tuesday
- 10 OctNASA's ISS-successor RFP is out; Cygnus XL lets go; SDA Falcon 9 resets for 07:39 UTC Saturday
- 9 OctMargaret Hamilton dies at 90; SpaceX asks rivals to share ephemeris; Crew-12 home; Part 450 rewrite proposed
- 8 OctCrew-12 splashes down 15:34 UTC today; Nuri flies 15 satellites; Artemis II data goes public
- 7 OctThemis hop slips again and the EU buys three months; Cygnus XL leaves the ISS Friday; 7,500 NASA contractors become civil servants
- 6 OctHyImpulse's SaxaVord flight slides to spring 2027; SDA batch slips a day; Crew-12 undocks Wednesday
- 5 OctSMILE starts science with a full UV aurora ring; SDA's 21-satellite batch goes at 08:17 UTC; Crew-12 hands over command
- 4 OctCrew-12 books a Wednesday undock; ESA prices its own crew vehicle at €10bn
- 3 OctOrbex rises again as Portugal's Omnidea; NROL-97 flies; Skyrora now aims at 2030
- 2 OctCrew-13 flies after valve surgery on a fuelled Dragon; Transporter-18 up; Flight 15 waits on paperwork
- 1 OctCrew-13 goes today at 15:10 UTC; Transporter-18 the same evening, NROL-97 Friday morning
- 30 SepSpaceX is done with Dragon after 2030, Starliner slips to 2028 — and Crew-13 goes Thursday at 15:10 UTC
- 29 SepStarship reaches orbit and comes home; NASA buys two more Starliner flights
- 28 SepThe FAA licence is in: Starship Flight 14 goes for orbit today at 12:15 UTC
- 27 SepNothing new worth your time
- 26 SepNASA and Boeing to brief on Starliner; USSF-385 fires up at 14:00 UTC today; Iridium shareholders clear the Rocket Lab takeover
- 25 SepLong March 6A flies clean overnight, Starship Flight 14 gets a window, and a European rover books a Blue Moon ride
- 24 SepStarship stacked for its first orbital shot; ExoMars lander passes backshell tests
- 23 SepPSLV-C62's third-stage anomaly, the CE20 hot-fired at 22 tonnes for LVM3 M7, and EOS-05's climb to geostationary finished