ASAP says 22 tankers for an HLS landing, Musk says 6-8; Space Force moves six launches off Vulcan; Xona raises $250M

National Security Space Launch manifest — six missions have been handed from ULA to SpaceX while Vulcan Centaur stays grounded, Space Systems Command boss Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant told an industry briefing. The contracts are not cancelled: ULA gets later missions back in a swap, and the payloads fly on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy instead. No return-to-flight date has been set. Vulcan is the only other American vehicle certified for these flights, so every month it sits on the ground pushes more of the US manifest onto one provider. That is the single-supplier problem the Space Force spent a decade trying to avoid. Vulcan has been down since 12 February 2026, when a Northrop Grumman GEM 63XL nozzle visibly failed shortly after USSF-87 lifted off — the second nozzle problem in four flights. SatNews

ASAP recommendation on Artemis IV — ASAP will formally recommend NASA revisit the objectives and possibly the architecture of Artemis IV, now the mission that would put people at the lunar South Pole. The panel counts too many firsts at once: untried landers, cryogenic propellant on the surface, limited abort options, and only one uncrewed landing demonstration required. It is the Artemis III reshuffle landing on the next mission in the queue. If NASA accepts the recommendation, the 2028 landing date gets harder to defend. NASA requires one uncrewed landing plus an engine restart; it does not require a demonstration of lifting off again and returning to lunar orbit. SpacePolicyOnline

“Calling it commercial did not make it so. Calling them partners did not make them so.”

Space Rider drop test — ESA's transport director Géraldine Naja told a briefing on Thursday 22 October that the parafoil came away from the full-scale test article during deployment, so it hit the ground. The drogue chute before it worked as intended. Wreckage has been recovered and an investigation board is sitting, with no cause identified yet. Space Rider is Europe's first reusable uncrewed orbital vehicle, and landing is the whole point of it, so how fast this is understood matters more than the loss of one mock-up. The test was on 6 October, dropped from a helicopter at about three kilometres over a military range in Sardinia; ESA still aims for a first flight on Vega C in the first half of 2028. European Spaceflight

“Unfortunately, the parafoil detached itself from the mock-up”

Xona Space Systems — closed a $250M Series D led by Steve Jurvetson's Future Ventures at a $2.45B valuation, taking total raised past $570M since 2019. The money goes into building Pulsar, a planned constellation of roughly 258 satellites offering a paid alternative to state-run satnav, with service starting next year. Six Pulsar satellites went up on Bandwagon-5 last week, so this is the money arriving right behind the hardware — a rare case of a navigation startup being funded after it has flown. Xona wants to be able to build 50 satellites a year by the end of 2027; in August it became the first commercial satnav operator cleared by the FCC to broadcast in L-band. Payload

Ariane 6 booster output — ESA has worked out that Europe probably will not have enough Ariane 6 rockets late this decade, director-general Josef Aschbacher said after the council met on 21-22 October. ESA has asked prime contractor ArianeGroup and Arianespace for ramp-up figures and is talking to Avio about booster production, but will not commit to anything until early next year. Europe's institutional payloads have nowhere else to go, so a shortfall in Ariane 6 is a shortfall in European access to orbit. Worth watching ahead of the ministerial. Aschbacher said firm action waits on solid launch-demand estimates expected early next year. Space Intel Report

Competition Model 2.0 — science chief Nicola Fox has told the community that proposals will be judged on the science case first, with engineering, cost and implementation detail deferred until a decision actually needs them. Step 1 drops about half the material an Announcement of Opportunity response currently demands, and the smallest missions go to a single-step competition. This decides how quickly the next Discovery or SMEX probe gets off the ground, and smaller teams without a big institution behind them get a fairer shot at flying something. Time from announcement to step 2 selection is meant to fall from 35 months to about 19.5; a virtual town hall is set for Monday 26 October. NASA Science

ISS roundup — NASASpaceFlight's monthly wrap of station logistics: Crew-13 arrived on 1 October, Crew-12 came home on 8 October, Cygnus XL was released on 9 October packed with rubbish, and the CRS-35 Dragon reached the Harmony zenith port on 15 October with supplies and a fresh roll-out solar array in its trunk. The solar array in that trunk is the one being bolted on next week, which ties this week's spacewalk preparation back to the cargo flight that brought the hardware. Crew Dragon Grace reached the station seven hours and 55 minutes after lifting off, the quickest arrival yet for a US spacecraft. NASASpaceFlight

GuoWang — China's state-backed broadband constellation ran another quasi-operational trial, carrying a five-way video call between the research vessel Jidi in Arctic waters, the Qinling station in Antarctica, a site near the Lhasa River and a ministry office in Qingdao. The operator also signed a cooperation agreement on 13 October for connectivity at remote sporting events. GuoWang is the constellation China is building against Starlink, and these trials are the clearest public read on how far along it actually is before any consumer rollout. 222 satellites are in orbit; Xinhua said Jidi moved over 100 gigabytes of data and more than 300 files while at sea. China in Space

Hanwha Aerospace orbital transfer vehicle — Korea's space agency disclosed on 22 October that Hanwha Aerospace was picked in June as prime contractor for the flight model of a tug that pushes payloads from low orbit to higher ones, with the agreement signed in August. The target mission is the eighth Nuri flight in 2029. It is how Korea plans to reach the Moon with a medium-lift rocket it already has, rather than waiting for a bigger one — and Hanwha, already Nuri's system integrator, is positioning to run launches commercially. The profile drops a 2U cubesat at 300 km first, then sends a 550 kg lunar communications satellite onto a translunar trajectory. 未来天玑

Starlink Spectrum Holdings / Tristar licences — the FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau approved SpaceX buying three unused AWS-3 licences from Mississippi's Tristar in an order released on 21 October, adding 15 MHz in the 1695-1710 MHz band to the next-generation direct-to-cell network. The band is uplink only: phones to satellites, not back down. Every slice of spectrum SpaceX collects makes satellite-to-phone service a product rather than an emergency fallback, and the regulator waived build-out rules to let it happen. The licences cover 62 counties across eight states, about 4% of the US population; SpaceX must hit satellite build-out targets at two, four and nine years after 30 November 2027. TeslaNorth

Expedition 75 — Joshua Kutryk tried on his spacesuit in the Quest airlock on Thursday while Anil Menon and Jessica Watkins checked fit and systems; Luke Delaney trained on Canadarm2 and ran the bioprinter in Columbus, printing blood vessels from vascular cells. The 29 October spacewalk is the next thing on station worth clearing an evening for, and fit checks are the last routine hurdle before it. Menon and Kutryk are to exit Quest on 29 October to install a roll-out solar array on the port truss, on a planned six hour 45 minute excursion. NASA