Issue 29 · Wednesday 21 October 2026 · 4 min read

Space Rider test model destroyed in drop test; Bandwagon-5 flies; SpaceX books a profit and floats a Tesla merger

In this issue: What's hot · Flew (2) · What people are saying · News (8) · One takeaway

What's hot

Space Rider — A full-scale Space Rider test article was dropped from a helicopter earlier this month and never got its parafoil open. ESA says the model was lost and an independent investigation is under way. Space Rider is Europe's small uncrewed spaceplane, meant to carry experiments in orbit and then glide down under a parafoil to a soft landing. It is the second interruption to the final drop-test campaign this year, after a May attempt was called off during the climb under a CH-47 Chinook helicopter.

This was the campaign meant to prove the landing system end to end before flight, and the hardware that was proving it no longer exists. ESA has not said whether it will build a replacement model or when it tries again. ESA still expects a first flight in 2028, though the target has slid from the first quarter to the second, on a Vega C with the uprated P160C first stage. European Spaceflight

Flew

Falcon 9 | Bandwagon-5 — flew from Florida at 11:04 UTC Tuesday with a SpaceX Starfall capsule aboard; the booster landed on A Shortfall of Gravitas.
Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 15-15 — 27 satellites from Vandenberg on booster B1063's 36th flight slipped out of Tuesday evening and is now set for 21:59 UTC Wednesday.

What people are saying

Ars Technica medium-lift guide — Eric Berger has published a ranked guide to the four American medium-lift rockets in development — Stoke's Nova, Relativity's Terran R, Rocket Lab's Neutron and the Firefly/Northrop Eclipse — with his own guesses at when each debuts, and invites readers to argue with him in the comments. The framing is that nobody has flown a new American medium-lift rocket since Antares 13 years ago, and SpaceX is pulling Falcon 9 off the commercial market as soon as 2028, leaving satellite operators unsure who to book for 2027 to 2030.

This is the argument the forums will be having all week: who actually flies first. It also sets markers you can hold the companies to as each one hot-fires and ships hardware over the next year. Stoke says early 2027 for Nova and Berger guesses July 2027; he puts Neutron in January 2028 and Eclipse at NET 2029. Relativity has finished acceptance testing on all 13 Aeon R engines and hot-fired the Terran R second stage. Ars Technica

News

SpaceX Q3 — brought $14.6 billion of revenue, up 161 percent, and on the call came word that SpaceX and Tesla have each formed a special committee of independent directors to study combining. Musk said nothing is agreed and a deal is not certain. The AI computing arm, at $7.56 billion, now earns more than Starlink — the company paying for Starship is turning into an AI company. The quarter showed $4.4 billion of net income, 35 cents a share, after a $541 million loss three months earlier. Fortune
Expedition 75 — spent Tuesday on bioprinting and cancer samples while Anil Menon configured tools and inspected tethers in the Quest airlock for two spacewalks, on 29 October and 5 November, when he and Canada's Joshua Kutryk install the final roll-out solar arrays. These two EVAs (extravehicular activities, or spacewalks) close out a long power upgrade and are the next crew events worth clearing an evening for. NASA said at Tuesday's preview that the roll-out arrays raise station power generation by up to 30 percent. NASA
Artemis Accords — gained Uzbekistan as its 77th signatory, signed in Samarkand by foreign minister Bakhtiyor Saidov during a visit by the US secretary of state; Uzbek state press reported it first and NASA confirmed it a day later. The accords are the diplomatic scaffolding around lunar operations, and the pattern of Russia's neighbours joining keeps extending: among them only China, Mongolia, Belarus, Georgia and Azerbaijan have stayed out. Uzbek students are working to build and launch the country's first CubeSat by 2028. Behind The Black
Launch Complex 301 — is the Wenchang pad China's Moon crews will fly from, and it is close to finished: the first crew access arm was attached to the support tower around 14 October, ground works are largely done, and two mobile launch platforms are late in outfitting. Pad hardware is the most honest schedule signal for the Long March 10, whose first flights come before any crewed landing attempt. China still says its first two taikonauts land no later than October 2029, with Mengzhou and Lanyue tested in orbit in 2027 and 2028. China in Space
SR-1 Freedom — is NASA's fission-powered spacecraft, and the agency has agreed contract actions for its nuclear power module: Sierra Lobo will supply the closed Brayton cycle system that turns reactor heat into electricity, with the work done at Glenn Research Center. It would be the first reactor flown beyond Earth orbit, and it carries a payload you will want to follow — three Mars helicopters descended from Ingenuity. Launch is planned for late 2028; the reactor comes from Idaho National Laboratory and stays shut down until the spacecraft is clear of Earth orbit. NASA
VIPER — sits fully assembled at Johnson Space Center in final testing before shipping to Florida, bound for the lunar South Pole in 2027 aboard a Blue Moon Mark 1 lander. NASA's video update also covers the crewed rovers from Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, both due to hand over flight hardware at the end of 2027. Hardware in test is firmer than a slide, and this rover is the first real surface mobility of the Moon Base programme. VIPER should drive more than 18 miles; the crewed rovers are specified to carry up to 176 pounds of samples and tools. NASA
Borealis — is Reaction Dynamics' newly unveiled medium-lift rocket, rated at 6,000 kg to low Earth orbit and aiming at a first orbital attempt in 2031, after the small Aurora launcher tries for orbit in the fourth quarter of 2028. Canada keeps adding home-grown launch entrants, and this one has already swapped its hybrid engine for a liquid one, with 21 hot fires on the new engine so far. The company has raised about $50M CDN, is raising a Series B of more than $70M CDN, and estimates $200M+ CDN more to make the jump to Borealis. Payload
Reflex Aerospace — is to receive a minority investment from NVIDIA, meant to fund its manufacturing expansion in Bavaria and satellite platforms that do more data processing on board. A chipmaker buying into a European smallsat maker is a new sort of money in this sector, and it is tied to Europe's push to build its own AI and technology infrastructure. Announced on 19 October; neither company disclosed the size of the stake or the terms. SpaceWatch.Global

One takeaway

Know what a system-level drop test is meant to prove. A drop test hangs a vehicle under a helicopter, releases it at altitude and lets it bring itself down. Earlier Space Rider drops used mass simulators; this campaign used a full-scale model matching the real mass, shape and landing gear, because it was the last chance before flight to show the parafoil and the autonomous landing logic working together in realistic conditions. The parafoil did not open, so that demonstration is now unfinished and the article that was to make it is gone. European Spaceflight

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How this issue was made. Researched and written by an agent, produced on 21 October 2026, 04:08. 36 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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