Crew-13 flies after valve surgery on a fuelled Dragon; Transporter-18 up; Flight 15 waits on paperwork

Starship Flight 15 — will be hardware-ready before it is paperwork-ready. Booster 22 and Ship 42 are having Raptors fitted in the Mega Bays, but the current launch licence covers Flight 14 only and has to be amended first. SpaceX gets that amendment faster if it repeats the Flight 14 profile rather than stretching Ship 42 to a long-duration mission. Flight 15 is where a tower catch comes back on the table, and the date will be set by a regulatory change, not by the next static fire. Booster 22 is roughly two weeks from static fire and Ship 42 two to three, with both possibly flight-ready by the end of October. NASASpaceflight

Three experiments in computing from orbit. Thursday's rideshare carried three payloads that each take on one leg of the orbital-data-centre idea: Cowboy Space's Reason-1, which will try to send solar power to the ground as an infrared laser beam; Google's Project Suncatcher demonstrator, built with Planet Labs, running AI chips in orbit; and Star Catcher's Protostar, which will beam power across to a separate small satellite. This is why rideshares are suddenly interesting again: one Falcon 9 carried the first real flight tests of a business everyone has been talking about on paper. Google's satellite flies four Trillium chips on roughly a kilowatt of solar power, and they must idle every 15 to 20 minutes to shed heat. Payload

Falcon Heavy | NROL-97 — was set to lift from pad 39A at 03:53 UTC Friday with a classified National Reconnaissance Office payload, the agency's first ride on the three-core rocket after 22 missions on single Falcon 9s. The outcome was not confirmed when this issue closed. It was also meant to be SpaceX's third Falcon launch of the day and the first time it recovers four boosters inside one day — worth checking the result before you believe either. New centre core B1106 is expended; side boosters B1104 and B1072, which flew the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope a month ago, come back to Landing Zones 1 and 2. Spaceflight Now

China's 2026 launch count — stands at 70 orbital attempts after a Long March 8A put the 26th Guowang internet batch up from Hainan on 23 September and a Long March 6A flew the fourth Yaogan-40 trio from Taiyuan the next day. Clearing 100 launches in a calendar year for the first time would take at least 31 more before the year ends. It tells you how dense the next three months of Chinese launch coverage will be, and where the crewed flight sits in it. Shenzhou-24 now looks like a November flight on a Long March 2F from Jiuquan; reports that a Pakistani payload specialist will be aboard, which would be Tiangong's first foreign visitor, are expected but not officially confirmed. SpaceNews

Katalyst's Link — NASA and the company have now described what broke on the attempt to reboost the ageing Swift observatory. A switch in the power electronics driving the reaction wheels failed, software workarounds held for a few weeks, then an unresponsive thruster valve set the spacecraft spinning and the rendezvous was abandoned. This is the first honest debrief of a commercial satellite rescue, and the parts everyone doubted — robotic arms, plasma thrusters — are the parts that worked. Built in nine months under a $30 million contract, Link still manoeuvred to about 10 km from Swift for navigation tests before reentering on 25 September. Ars Technica

Canada Rocket Company — the Toronto outfit, one of three funded this spring under Ottawa's Launch the North programme, is going straight to a medium-lift vehicle. The R-2 would use nine methane engines and landing legs, carry up to 12.5 tonnes to low Earth orbit, and could fly by 2032 if everything goes right. A national launch effort driven by sovereignty politics rather than a customer is a new entrant worth watching from the start, not from its first hop. About 30 staff, $22.5 million raised so far, and a $30 million engine test site named for Jeremy Hansen on 50 leased acres near London, Ontario. Ars Technica

Andøya Spaceport — the Norwegian government proposes almost NOK 650 million (close to €60 million) for a second orbital pad, with the state owning it and leasing it to Andøya Space. That reverses the earlier plan, under which a second pad depended on the operator landing a long-term customer first. Pad one belongs to Isar Aerospace for years to come, so this is the thing that decides whether anyone else in Europe can launch from Norwegian soil this decade. An initial NOK 323.3 million would sit in the 2027 budget, published on 7 October; Isar's Spectrum flew successfully from pad one on 5 September 2026 with FramSat-1 aboard. European Spaceflight

Foundational — is a London company out of stealth with an £8.2M pre-seed round to turn satellite laser ranging into a service: small mirrors flown on customer satellites, automated ground stations that fire laser pulses and time the return, and software that turns that into very precise positions. Conjunction warnings are only as good as the orbit knowledge behind them, and uncertain positions are why operators dodge things they never needed to dodge. It only works on satellites carrying its reflectors — 16 are in orbit with around 60 waiting to fly — and service is planned for early 2027 from the first three or four stations. Payload