Margaret Hamilton dies at 90; SpaceX asks rivals to share ephemeris; Crew-12 home; Part 450 rewrite proposed

Part 450 — is the FAA rule every US launch and reentry licence now runs through, and the Department of Transportation has put out five proposed changes to it: consolidated safety paperwork, electronic applications, simpler hazard-area sizing, relief on lightning rules for descending vehicles, and a blast-analysis fix. Secretary Sean Duffy announced them on Tuesday as the first product of the SPACE Task Force set up on 9 September. Licensing is the thing that actually gates how often you get to watch something fly, including Starship. The rule has issued 14 licences in five years since March 2021; public comments close 4 November. Payload

“just the beginning”

NASA and the Energy Department sign a space nuclear agreement. is the memorandum Jared Isaacman and Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed on Thursday at the Golden Age Summit in Washington, setting out who does what across fuel production, testing, launch integration and operations for reactors and radioisotope systems in space. Surface power is the unglamorous thing a permanent lunar base actually needs, and this is the paperwork that has to exist before any of the 2028-2030 hardware dates mean anything. The agreement takes effect on 1 November; a December 2025 executive order wants a launch-ready lunar surface reactor by 2030, with Space Reactor-1 Freedom due to launch in 2028. NASA

Amazon Leo — Amazon told Ars it has built satellite number 1,000 at its Kirkland factory, has 396 of them in orbit, and is weeks from selling broadband commercially. Rajeev Badyal also confirmed the next Vulcan, returning to flight, carries Leo satellites, with an Arianespace mission and at least one more Vulcan to follow this year. A second real constellation changes the launch manifest you watch all year, and it is the only competitor that could push Starlink on price. Production went from 27 satellites in six months to 27 a week; the first-generation network is to total 3,232 satellites. Ars Technica

Themis — ESA says its hop-test stage got through a second wet dress rehearsal at Esrange in Sweden on 29 September: a full countdown practice with the tanks loaded, plus a first workout for the robots meant to drive up to a landed rocket and drain it. Themis is the vehicle Europe's answer to a reusable booster rides on, and the hop keeps sliding, so each rehearsal is the only real evidence of progress. The stage was filled with liquid nitrogen chilled to -200C as a non-flammable stand-in for its methane and oxygen propellants, and is designed to land inside a 20 by 20 metre patch. ESA

SSPICY — NASA has laid out what the Starfish Space Otter craft that went up on 1 October from Vandenberg will do: fly to as many as four dead American satellites and rocket bodies and look them over close up, working out spin rate, attitude and the state of their surfaces largely on its own. Inspection is step one of everything people promise about servicing and debris removal, and it is being tried as an integrated system for the first time here. Close approaches using autonomous guidance begin in early 2027; the washing-machine-sized craft uses electric propulsion and an articulating robotic boom to aim its thrusters. NASA

Fortastra — The California company, founded in 2025 to build spacecraft that can shadow and deter hostile satellites, raised a $30M Series A led by First In. It has flown two demonstration missions already, one of them a satellite on last month's Transporter-18 rideshare. Funding rounds in this corner tell you where the money thinks the next decade of launch demand comes from, and Transporter manifests are where you will see it first. Its next, far more representative spacecraft could fly as early as the first quarter of 2028. Payload

MMX — JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration spacecraft is set to leave Tanegashima on Monday 19 October EDT, and NASA will hold a teleconference on Thursday 15 October at 20:00 UTC to walk through the American hardware aboard. This is the next genuine deep-space departure on the calendar, and the first attempt to bring a piece of a Martian moon home. Arrival at Mars is August 2027, the Phobos sample is collected NET December 2028, and the capsule reaches Earth in 2031; NASA supplied the MEGANE spectrometer and the Honeybee Robotics sampler. NASA