China lays out its two-launch Moon plan; Falcon 9's 700th; Turkey's lunar orbiter starts shake-and-bake

Haolong — the winged cargo vehicle China picked in 2024 to supplement its Tianzhou freighters, now has a launcher: LandSpace won the tender announced on 28 October at 95 million yuan, with CAS Space runner-up at 100 million on the Kinetica-2. Tiangong logistics stops being a one-vendor business, and LandSpace's reusable Zhuque-3 picks up a flagship customer that needs a big fairing. In orbit the spaceplane is roughly 10 metres by 8 metres, and no more than 7,000 kilograms sitting on the rocket. China in Space

TLM-1 — Turkey's first lunar orbiter entered environmental testing this week, beginning in a thermal vacuum chamber, ahead of a Falcon 9 launch booked between April and June 2027, with April the aim. If it arrives, Turkey becomes the ninth sovereign nation operating a payload at the Moon, and does it with hardware built almost entirely at home rather than bought in. The roughly 3.6 tonne spacecraft is designed for at least five months in a 100 km circular polar orbit, with 56 of its 65 elements made in Turkey, and ends with a controlled impact. Spaceflight Now

FCC opens 25 MHz to auction with satellites riding second. Commissioners voted on Friday 30 October to start a rulemaking that would auction the 1675–1695 MHz and 2020–2025 MHz bands for terrestrial 5G, while letting satellite direct-to-device services in as a secondary user of the same frequencies. It is the regulator's answer to the fight over satellite-to-phone spectrum: offer operators new bands instead of forcing them into the ones the carriers want kept clean. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have asked the agency to keep satellites out of 290 MHz of mid-band; the FCC wants up to 400 MHz in commercial use by 2028. SatNews

Pulsar — Xona's first six low-orbit navigation satellites, launched on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare on 20 October, are in orbit, and the company's chief executive used a Silicon Valley panel to argue that American resilience against GPS jamming now quietly rests on Chinese signals. A commercial navigation fleet is a new category of spacecraft to follow, and the dependency claim is both the sales pitch and the policy fight behind it. SatNews

“It’s actually worse to have bad location than no location.”

City Labs — which flew what it calls the first commercial nuclear satellite in July, is preparing an FAA application to carry far more tritium per mission, aimed at keeping landers alive through the two-week lunar night without hauling batteries. FAA payload authorisation is the quiet gate anything radioactive has to pass before it flies commercially, and this is the first serious attempt to widen it since the rules changed in 2019. The BOHR demonstrator carried 20 curies under a permit written for 10,000; the new request is 10 million curies, which the company equates to 300 watts of heat. SatNews