Ship 40 is home at Starbase; CRS-35 up and docking Thursday; Artemis III boosters stacked

Artemis III — NASA says the twin solid rocket boosters for the next Moon mission are fully stacked on the mobile launcher, nose cones on, and all four RS-25 engines are now bolted to the core stage. Next comes the systems tunnel along the core, then mating it to the boosters for a partial "short stack" that rolls to Pad 39B for a propellant-loading rehearsal. This is the running story you track between flights: hardware, not dates, is the honest measure of how close Artemis III actually is. The boosters supply more than 75 percent of SLS thrust at liftoff, and the crew — Randy Bresnick, Frank Rubio, Andre Douglas and ESA's Luca Parmitano — will rehearse launch day and the emergency exit route while the stack is at the pad. NASA

Griffin-1 — Voyager Technologies' large lunar lander, built by Astrobotic, finished vibration, acoustic and thermal-vacuum testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has gone back to Pittsburgh for final assembly before shipping to Cape Canaveral. It flies on a Falcon Heavy under NASA's commercial lunar delivery programme, carrying more than 1,100 pounds of cargo to Nobile Crater near the lunar south pole. It is the biggest commercial lander yet aiming at the south pole, and it is now plausibly a this-year launch rather than a slide to 2027. Horns fed by compressed nitrogen blasted the lander with up to 153 decibels, and it spent about two weeks cycling between 167 F and minus 148 F in the 25-Foot Space Simulator. NASA JPL

Idefix — JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration probe, launching Monday 19 October at 19:41 UTC on an H3, carries a 25-kilogram Franco-German rover that will be dropped onto Phobos from 40 metres, touching down at about 1 metre per second — below the moon's escape velocity, so it stays put. It would be the first wheeled rover to drive on an ultra-low-gravity body. This is the part of the Phobos mission nobody has done before, and the engineering constraints explain why it will creep rather than drive. Idefix is to roll at roughly 1 mm per second with a hard emergency limit of 5 cm/s, because an abrupt stop any faster would tip it over; it is built to work for 100 days. Aerospace America

“the same as a grape or a medium-sized envelope”

Andøya Spaceport — The proposed Norwegian state budget published on 7 October sets aside NOK 323.3 million (€30 million) in 2027 for a second orbital launch pad, out of a total project budget of NOK 646 million, with the rest expected in the 2028 budget. The defence ministry carries NOK 223.5 million of the 2027 share. Europe's only operational orbital launch site gains a second pad only if parliament votes the money, so this is the step that turns a September announcement into something buildable. Under the revised model the state builds and owns the infrastructure and Andøya Space leases and operates it, with the armed forces expected to take over security around the site; completion is targeted for 2028. European Spaceflight

Christina Koch — NASA has named Koch acting deputy chief engineer from 1 November, succeeding Katherine Van Hooser, who retires on 21 October after more than 35 years. The move puts Koch on management astronaut status, which makes her ineligible for future flight assignments. She flew around the Moon on Artemis II in April and holds the longest single spaceflight by a woman; taking herself off the flight list is a real cost, and it changes the pool for later Artemis crews. Koch spent 328 consecutive days aboard the ISS; Van Hooser had been deputy chief engineer since 2023 and was chief engineer for the shuttle main engine through the final 21 shuttle flights. NASA

Perseverance — A navigation camera frame taken on 11 October, the mission's 2,006th sol, marks the drive on which the rover's cumulative distance passed that of Opportunity, which covered 45.16 kilometers over fifteen years on Mars. Odometry is the plain measure of how much ground a rover has actually worked, and Perseverance has now out-driven the benchmark that stood for a decade. That single sol's drive covered 91.31 meters, and the image is catalogued as PIA26812. NASA Science