Neutron slips to 2027 over composite voids; Dragon docked; Ariane 6 back NET 23 Nov

Ariane 6 — finally has a date to fly again: NET 23 November, with 36 Amazon Leo satellites on the four-booster Ariane 64. That is nearly seven weeks later than the 7 October slot it held, after a problem Arianespace never fully spelled out. La Tribune reported, unconfirmed by ArianeGroup, that a liquid hydrogen turbopump anomaly found on an engine acceptance test has been resolved. It tells you when Europe's only heavy launcher is back, and how thin its year ends up: six flights instead of the seven or eight planned. It would be the fifth Ariane 6 of 2026 and the tenth since July 2024; nine to ten are still targeted for 2027. European Spaceflight

Artemis II — closed out its biggest open question: months of sample extraction, X-ray scans and laser mapping confirmed Orion's Avcoat heat shield behaved as predicted on April's crewed lunar flyby. The fix was flying a shorter downrange distance during entry, which cut the time spent in the temperature band where Artemis I lost chunks of char. The Artemis I char-loss saga cost the programme a year; this is the formal sign-off that it is behind them, with Artemis III Orion already powered up at Kennedy. Nine spots of char loss on the Artemis II dish, against 103 on Artemis I — a tenfold reduction. Orion peaked at 39 times the speed of sound. NASA

ClearSpace — is prime contractor for the UK's first active debris removal mission, launching NET 2029 on a contract worth about £61M ($81M). The spacecraft is to find two defunct UK-registered satellites in low orbit, inspect them, close in, grab them with robotic claws and move them down. Nobody has yet removed a piece of debris from orbit, so this is the one to watch for whether capture of an uncooperative, tumbling object actually works outside a simulation. UKSA frames the hard parts as inspection, proximity operations and capture of unprepared objects — the same skills a servicing business would sell. Payload

MMX — launches from Tanegashima on Monday 19 October at 19:41 UTC, and NASA has laid out what it put aboard JAXA's Phobos sample-return craft: the MEGANE gamma-ray and neutron spectrograph, a nitrogen-gas pneumatic sampler on a landing leg, and Deep Space Network tracking. It is the next interplanetary departure on the board and the first attempt to bring back a piece of a Martian moon, so the launch window matters more than most. Arrival at Mars is August 2027, the Phobos sample is collected NET December 2028 and returns in 2031; NASA curates about 15% of it at Johnson Space Center. NASA Science

ArkEdge Space — won two JAXA awards for Moon navigation work: a study on fitting a Lunar Augmented Navigation Service receiver to the pressurised crew rover Japan is building for Artemis, and a receiver to pick up signals from Japan's lunar navigation demo satellite, which the same company is building. Lunar navigation is quietly becoming infrastructure rather than a paper study, and interoperability with NASA and ESA signals is being designed in now rather than argued about later. Neither award's value was disclosed; the study covers the receiver's mass, power and heat-rejection needs on the rover. Payload

HEO — extended its deal with BlackSky for another year in a seven-figure contract, and can now borrow the sharper Gen-3 satellites to photograph other spacecraft up close while those cameras would otherwise be idle over ocean or night side. Inspecting objects in orbit from orbit is the capability underneath every close-approach and anomaly story this autumn, and it is being built by renting time rather than launching new hardware. Gen-3 resolves 35 cm against Gen-2's one metre; HEO operates more than 50 sensors in orbit and closed a $25M Series B weeks ago. Payload