Artemis III core stage joins its boosters; Vulcan returns NET 13 Nov; the seventh IROSA walk today at 12:00 UTC

Vulcan Leo 1 — is ULA's return to flight after nine months down, set for NET Friday 13 November from Cape Canaveral pending range approval, carrying 40 satellites for Amazon's Leo broadband network. Two of Vulcan's first four flights suffered solid rocket booster nozzle failures, the last in February, and the rocket will fly an improved nozzle design while testing continues in parallel. The Space Force wants flight data from commercial missions before it entrusts Vulcan with national security payloads again. Vulcan's grounding is why six military missions moved to SpaceX; this launch decides whether that drain stops. It is the first Vulcan with six solid boosters and an extended fairing, 221 feet tall in total. Ars Technica

New Glenn — Blue Origin has finished rebuilding the 430-foot vehicle access tower at Launch Complex 36, wrecked when a New Glenn blew up during a static fire in May, and reporting aggregated by SatNet News says the return to flight could come as early as November. No date is confirmed; the industry had been assuming late December or January 2027. A second New Glenn is the thing standing between Blue Moon, Artemis cargo and a one-rocket US heavy-lift market. The failure was traced to an oxygen valve problem on one BE-4 engine, and the explosion damaged ground infrastructure as well as the vehicle. SatNet News

FCC direct-to-device vote — The FCC votes today on a proposal that would widen the spectrum satellites may use to talk straight to ordinary phones, from five eligible bands to 13. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile asked the agency a day beforehand to strike 290 MHz of that, the 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz bands, arguing satellite use there is not workable. SpaceX, going the other way, asked on 23 October for 902 to 928 MHz to be added. Direct-to-cell is now a regulatory fight, and the band list decides what Starlink's phone service can actually become. T-Mobile claims interference could erase as much as 96% of a cell site's uplink coverage area. Teslarati

Reid Wiseman — The Artemis II commander and now emeritus astronaut becomes Caltech associate vice president and deputy director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on 30 November, responsible for lab operations and for JPL's national security work. JPL has spent a punishing year of budget pressure and mission cancellations, so who runs it matters to every robotic mission you follow; it also confirms Wiseman has left the astronaut office for good. Artemis II carried him with Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen on a lunar flyby covering 695,081 miles, farther from Earth than anyone had been. NASA

Artemis Accords — Vietnam has become the 78th country to sign, with its science and technology minister putting his name to the document at the Vietnam International Digital Week in Ha Long. The Accords, set up in 2020 by NASA, the State Department and seven other founding nations, commit signatories to transparent operations, aid to those in distress and open sharing of scientific data. The signature list is the nearest thing to a scoreboard for which way national programmes are leaning. Vietnam has opened a National Space Center in Hanoi and is building Earth-observation satellites under its LOTUSat programme. NASA

Rendezvous Robotics — The Colorado startup has closed $20 million, led by MaC Venture Capital and Toyota Ventures, to build satellites that launch as loose pieces and snap themselves together in orbit. Its hardware is a set of roughly one-metre hexagonal tiles with their own sensors and processors that latch using electromagnetic fields, grown out of the TESSERAE research programme at MIT. It is one answer to a real constraint you keep meeting: antennas and arrays that no fairing will swallow. Thirty-two tiles go to the ISS NET December; a seven-tile demo in open vacuum is planned NET April 2028. Payload

Hera — ESA's asteroid probe, launched in 2024, has for the first time seen Didymos and its moonlet Dimorphos as separate objects rather than one dot. The picture was taken on the evening of 18 October with the monochrome Asteroid Framing Camera from 1,280 km out, with Dimorphos covering about a single pixel. It is the first sign that Hera's instruments are resolving what they were sent to measure: the crater and orbit change DART left behind. Dimorphos is 151 m across, Didymos 780 m, and they circle about 1.15 km apart; DART's 2022 impact shortened that orbit by roughly 32 minutes. Behind The Black

Lucy — After five years of looping through the inner solar system, with flybys of Earth and two asteroids along the way, NASA's Lucy has reached the cloud of Trojan asteroids that leads Jupiter around the Sun at the L4 point. Navigators place it there using radio tracking and star images rather than any visible boundary. The cruise phase you have been half-ignoring for five years is over; from here the spacecraft starts doing the thing it was built for. First target is the 42-mile-wide Eurybates on 11 August 2027, with further flybys running to November 2028. Behind The Black

Yueqian-1 — Shenzhen's Dahang Yueqian says the second stage of its first-flight vehicle has passed a combined electrical matching test, checking that the avionics on the rocket, the ground control system and external interfaces talk to each other and that the flight sequence is correctly timed. The company says the stage is now ready to support hot-fire testing. This is the second Chinese firm building toward a chopstick-style tower catch, so its ground campaign is worth keeping in view. Yueqian-1 is pitched as a reusable medium-heavy launcher carrying more than 10 tonnes, recovered by a tower with catch arms. SatNet News

IROSA — the roll-out solar arrays NASA has been bolting on since 2021, reaches its final two installs: the seventh goes out today, the eighth on 5 November, both by Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk. Finishing the set is what keeps the lab powered through to its planned 2030 deorbit, so this is the end of a five-year upgrade you have watched in pieces. All eight together raise available power from 160 kilowatts to about 215. Spaceflight Now