Artemis III laid out day by day, Long March 8A away, Vulcan's Amazon Leo slips to November

Starlink Group 15-15 — 27 satellites from Pad 4E at Vandenberg on Friday at 22:48 UTC, with booster B1063 landing on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You for its 36th flight. The batch is routine; the cadence is the story. These flights once came every two or three days, and the gaps are now weeks as SpaceX shifts payload work to Starship and the larger V3 satellites. It was the Falcon 9's 116th flight of 2026, tracking to just under 150 by year end, against 165 in 2025. Space.com

China says its state broadband constellation has passed 200 satellites. China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation says its national low-orbit broadband network has now cumulatively deployed more than 200 satellites, the most recent launch putting up eighteen at once, with service pilots running in some regions. It is the state answer to Starlink, and the number needs reading carefully: the aggregator that carried the claim published a correction saying the original text gave satellites cumulatively deployed, not satellites currently working in orbit. The constellation works between 500 and 1,200 km, with tens of gigabits per second per spacecraft and latency about a tenth of a geostationary link. SatNet News

Lanyue — China's crewed lunar lander will first fly to the surface without a crew, and on 22 October the China Manned Space Agency invited Chinese agencies, universities and companies to propose science cargo for that flight. It is the first public outline of how the lander gets proven before taikonauts ride it, and the timing has to fit a crewed landing promised no later than October 2029. Items are capped at 50 kilograms and 100 watts, with proposals due by 1 March 2027; the Long March 10 Moon rocket is expected to debut NET mid-2027. China in Space

Griffin Mission One — Voyager Technologies' robotic lunar lander has come through environmental testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which simulated the temperatures, vibration and acoustic noise of launch and landing. It is one of the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) landers still nominally launching this year, and environmental testing is usually the gate that separates a lander on paper from one on a rocket. Griffin-1 carries more than 455 kilograms of cargo to a site near the lunar south pole, including Astrolab's FLIP rover; the test photo was taken on 31 August in JPL's 25-foot space simulator. Space.com

Apex — the Los Angeles bus manufacturer opened talks on 22 October to raise about $500 million at a roughly $4 billion valuation, with Washington Harbour Partners expected to lead and Andreessen Horowitz and XYZ Venture Capital joining. Buses are where the mass-produced constellation era shows up as money: defence demand for proliferated orbits is pulling a component maker's valuation up faster than most launch companies manage. Apex raised $200 million at $2.3 billion in June; its Factory One line is set up for roughly 200 platforms a year, feeding Northrop Grumman work for Golden Dome flight tests in 2027. SatNews

*ST Hangtu — Aerospace Hongtu, one of the first 25 companies on the STAR Market in 2019, said on 12 October that false bid documents had barred it from military space procurement until 8 October 2027, its third such suspension. The counterweight to all the Chinese funding rounds: the sector produces failures too, and this one anchors a local commercial-space cluster in Hebi, Henan. Unpaid staff wages reached 420 million yuan by the end of 2025, and first-half 2026 revenue fell 82.46% with net assets at minus 1.367 billion yuan. SatNet News

CTIA — the American carriers' trade body, acting for AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, asked the FCC to cut the 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz bands from its draft supplemental coverage from space rules published on 8 October, arguing satellite transmissions over time-division 5G would interfere. Direct-to-cell from orbit now lives or dies on spectrum rulemaking rather than hardware, and this is the incumbents pushing back weeks after the FCC handed SpaceX more room to work with. The filing claims interference exposure for more than 300 million mobile users; it was first reported on 19 October. SatNet News