Issue 11 · Saturday 3 October 2026 · 3 min read

Orbex rises again as Portugal's Omnidea; NROL-97 flies; Skyrora now aims at 2030

In this issue: What's hot · Flew · News (3) · One takeaway

What's hot

PrimeNEO — Orbex, the Scottish small-launcher firm that went into administration in February, has had its hardware, tooling, intellectual property and even its name bought by Portuguese space group Omnidea, which closed the deal on 30 September. Omnidea says it will rework the Prime rocket into a simpler, easier-to-build vehicle called PrimeNEO, and has dropped Proxima, the bigger rocket Orbex pitched for ESA's European Launcher Challenge.

Europe's small-launch shakeout has mostly produced obituaries; this is the rare case of a dead programme's hardware being picked up and flown by someone else, and it keeps the Forres factory and a core of ex-Orbex staff working. No first-flight date has been offered, so treat any timeline you hear as speculation. The deal covers two of the three buildings Orbex ran at Forres, Scotland, and Omnidea has set aside more than €10 million to absorb the assets and stand up a UK team; a launch site, Scotland or Portugal, will be chosen later. European Spaceflight

“Our goal is to have an available launcher in time to still be relevant in this ever-expanding market.”
- Omnidea

Flew

Falcon Heavy | NROL-97 — Falcon Heavy lifted off with the NROL-97 payload for the US National Reconnaissance Office at 03:54 UTC on Friday 2 October; the launch was a success.

News

Crew-13 and Crew-12 — The Dragon carrying Crew-13 caught up with the International Space Station in under eight hours on Thursday, the shortest Dragon transit flown so far, helped by an orbital alignment that followed a Cygnus XL reboost on 25 September. The four station residents it replaces are packing to undock as soon as Monday 5 October, after a handover much shorter than the usual week. It is a compressed rotation rather than a leisurely one, because the port is wanted for the CRS-35 cargo Dragon bringing the last pair of roll-out solar arrays, which must be installed before the Sun angle shuts down spacewalks. Docking came 7 hours 55 minutes after liftoff; the previous Dragon best was about 12 hours, set by the uncrewed CRS-31. SpacePolicyOnline
Skyrora — The Scottish company has just hotfired a scaled-down version of the engine meant for the first stage of its orbital Skylark XL, and in the same breath told Payload it is now tentatively targeting 2030 for an orbital attempt. A year ago it was talking about late 2026. Its suborbital Skylark L2 has been sitting ready since 2022, waiting on a pad at SaxaVord. If you track Europe's launch race, this is one competitor formally stepping out of the sprint and saying so, while German rivals move into the same Shetland spaceport. Skyrora has raised roughly $65.9M since 2017 and reckons it needs about twice that again to reach orbit. Payload
“I see rocket companies want to be rocket companies, rather than stable businesses.”
- Jack-James Marlow, Skyrora COO
DAVINCI — NASA baked an engineering model of its DAVINCI descent probe — Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging — in a ceramic-lined chamber, raising the temperature over roughly an hour to match what the real probe will feel falling through the Venusian atmosphere. The yoga-ball-sized vessel came through it. DAVINCI is one of the few Western missions actually being built for Venus, and thermal survival is the thing that kills landers there; a passed test is the sort of quiet hardware milestone that keeps a mission on track. The test ran from 28 August to 10 September and took the probe to 869 F (465 C). NASA

One takeaway

Blame the Sun angle for Monday's rushed undocking. A beta angle cutout is the period, a few times a year, when the Sun sits at an angle to the station's orbit that makes spacewalks unworkable — lighting and thermal conditions outside go out of limits. The final roll-out solar arrays arrive on CRS-35 and have to be installed by spacewalkers before the next cutout, so the cargo Dragon needs a port now. That is why Crew-12 leaves as soon as Monday 5 October rather than lingering. SpacePolicyOnline

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How this issue was made. Researched and written by an agent, produced on 3 October 2026, 04:03. 16 sources read, 0 unreachable. Every link above goes to the primary source. A person sets the brief and steers it; no person edited this text before it was sent.

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