NASA redraws the Artemis architecture; Electron's 98th; three Chinese launches overnight; Swift ends

Themis — ESA's hop-test demonstrator for a reusable first stage may not leave the ground in 2026 after all: transport director Géraldine Naja said on 22 October she was unsure, with winter closing in at Esrange in Sweden and a go/no-go call due by the end of November. Europe's only flying answer to booster reuse keeps sliding, and the gap to SpaceX widens with each shutdown. The two-hop campaign runs under the EU-funded SALTO initiative, budget €42.8 million, and Naja said a hop is needed before June 2027. European Spaceflight

Ariane 6 — ESA now says the engine problem that held up Ariane 6 launches has been dealt with, and that it is looking at how to fly the rocket more often. Europe's heavy lifter has been grounded by the issue while the Amazon Leo backlog waits, so a clean bill of health is the gate to the rest of the year's manifest. The last Ariane 64 with the upgraded solid boosters flew on 17 June with 36 Amazon Leo satellites aboard. SpaceNews

Expedition 75 — Friday on the station mixed bioprinting of blood vessels and work in a furnace that levitates samples in an electric field with the final paperwork for next week's excursion: all four US-segment astronauts joined a spacewalk procedures conference with ground engineers. This is the last substantive step before the array walk you have been tracking since the suit fit check. Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk leave the Quest airlock on Thursday 29 October to fit a roll-out solar array, with Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney on Canadarm2. NASA

Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — NASA has ended the science mission of its gamma-ray burst chaser: the spacecraft has sunk below 275 km, where drag stops it holding a target steady. It took its last observation on 20 October and should re-enter within weeks. A 22-year-old satellite coming down is a reentry to keep an eye on, and the rapid-response slot it filled is now empty. Launched in November 2004 for a two-year prime mission, it logged more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and leaves a 12-terabyte public archive. NASA Science

Astraeus — Orbital Operations, a Long Beach startup, has won up to $35M from the Defense Department to fly a full-scale in-orbit demonstration of its hydrogen-oxygen manoeuvring vehicle, which carries a refrigerator to stop the propellant boiling off so the stage can stay useful for years rather than a week. Keeping cryogenics cold in orbit is the same problem Starship's lunar refuelling depends on, being bought here at small-company scale. A $7M seed extension led by DTX Ventures takes total funding to about $16M; the roughly 13-person team hot-fired within six months of closing its seed. Payload

Space Force wants a third heavy-lift spaceport by 2030. Senior Space Force officers want a third site able to handle heavy and super-heavy rockets within four years, to take pressure off Florida and California. Those ranges saw 175 orbital launch attempts last year and are projected to reach 700 a year by 2036. No location has been chosen and no decision timeline exists. Range capacity, not rockets, is becoming the thing that sets how often anyone can fly from US soil. Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant says every ownership model stays open, including renting space on privately held land such as the Louisiana spaceport SpaceX intends to build. Ars Technica

China publishes a ten-point position on space governance. Xinhua released a formal Chinese position paper on outer space governance from Xiong'an on 23 October. Its ten points call for the UN to stay the main channel, for the Outer Space Treaty to remain the legal basis, for negotiations on an arms-control instrument, and for states to regulate their own commercial operators. It is Beijing's framing ahead of every traffic, debris and coordination argument you will read about for the next year. The paper names the risk of an arms race and the turning of space into a battlefield as the single biggest threat to space security, and asks states to notify launches, collision warnings and reentries. China News Service / Xinhua

Thunder-RS — Deep Blue Aerospace says its 130-tonne-class kerosene-and-oxygen engine has completed another 200-second long-duration hot fire. Where the previous two runs were about reliability, this one tested a reworked pintle-injector cooling scheme and improved combustion efficiency. Another Chinese reusable medium-lift programme moving from engine tests towards a full vehicle, and worth having on your list alongside the chopstick-catch outfits. The company frames the run as the groundwork for integrating the propulsion system of Nebula-2, its large reusable liquid rocket. Taibo