A house newsletter · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Wednesday 4 November 2026 · Issue 43 · 4 min read
Swift comes down this morning; last ISS array Thursday; the Starship tanker-count fight
What's hot
Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — NASA's gamma-ray burst hunter is making an uncontrolled reentry after two decades in orbit. As of Monday the U.S. Space Force put the fall at roughly 3:30 a.m. EST Wednesday, about 08:30 UTC, inside a band roughly 21 degrees either side of the equator that is mostly ocean. Most of the spacecraft burns up; some components are expected to survive to the surface.
You have followed this one through the failed commercial reboost attempt, so this is the end of the story rather than a surprise. The only live question now is where the surviving hardware comes down, and the answer will firm up only hours before it happens. NASA puts the chance of anyone on Earth being hurt at about 1 in 2,100, and says predictions will keep being updated until the end. Spaceflight Now
Flew
Mir demo flight — Slipped from Wednesday at 05:00 UTC to NET 30 November, and the date went back to unconfirmed.
Long March 12 / SatNet LEO group — Slipped from Thursday evening to NET Sunday 8 November at 20:25 UTC, with a half-hour window.
Vulcan VC6L / Amazon Leo LV-01 — Now set for Friday 13 November at 17:54 UTC, moved off a placeholder midnight slot and listed as Go.
What people are saying
Nobody agrees how many tankers a Moon landing needs. Space.com walks through NASA's published Artemis IV sequence and finds the key number missing. SpaceX would launch a depot ship to low Earth orbit, fill it with an unstated number of tanker flights, top up the lander there, then send the depot up again to a higher final tanking orbit before the lander meets Orion in high Earth orbit.
This is the argument that decides whether Starship or Blue Moon carries the first Artemis crew down, and the public estimates are now a factor of three apart with no referee. A 2021 GAO audit said up to 16 refuelling launches; a safety panel member recently said 22; Elon Musk answered closer to six or eight. Space.com
Isaacman: boost Hubble, do not let it fall on its own. NASA's administrator told NASASpaceFlight that an uncontrolled Hubble reentry is not acceptable, and that if money is spent on a visit the telescope should get more science out of it. The agency's request for information, open to the end of November, asks industry for three options: a reboost, a servicing mission, or a controlled disposal.
On the morning an old NASA telescope comes down over the ocean, this is the same question asked about a far more valuable one, and the answers are due in four weeks. Hubble is down to two working gyroscopes of six, which costs roughly 12 percent of its observing time, and drag is expected to bring it down in 2033–2034. NASASpaceFlight
“Hubble, you can't let it have an uncontrolled re-entry. That would not be the right thing to do.”
An Artemis pilot says go to the equator first. Jeff Foust gathers the dissent against NASA's south-pole Moon Base plan. Artemis 2 pilot Victor Glover argues the first landing should be somewhere familiar and sunlit near the equator, partly because a polar surface stay can strand a sick crew for a week. Planetary scientist Pascal Lee would put the base at Clavius crater and drive south from there.
NASA has still not said where on the pole it will build, and the people objecting are not outsiders: one of them flew around the Moon in April. Polar daytime surface temperatures run 40 to 90 kelvins, and a National Academies report picked four non-polar sortie regions: Bhabha Crater, Mons Hadley, Orientale Basin and Aristarchus Plateau. The Space Review
News
ISS roll-out solar array eight — goes outside on Thursday with NASA's Anil Menon and the CSA's Joshua Kutryk, their second walk in a week, this time on the starboard 3B power channel rather than the port side. It closes a programme that began with a 2017 demonstration and should run about seven hours. It is the last one, and after this the station's power system is finished for the rest of its life. Success takes station generation from 160 kilowatts to roughly 215 kilowatts, about 30 percent more; each array adds some 28 kilowatts. Starlust
ESCAPADE — fires engines on Saturday 7 November to leave the region of Lagrange point 2, where the two small orbiters have loitered since launching in November 2025, and head for Mars on a trajectory never flown before: out from Earth, back close, then away. It is the first real manoeuvre of a mission you last saw as New Glenn's debut payload, and it turns a parked spacecraft into one in cruise. Rocket Lab built the pair, Blue Origin launched them, and UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory flies the mission. Behind The Black
Presidential outer space proclamation — was signed on 3 November and declares the solar system and space beyond Earth open to exploration, development, use and a permanent presence by American citizens, consistent with US law and international obligations. It also pledges a return to the Moon by 2028 and says Artemis III flies next summer. It changes no treaty and funds nothing, but it is the clearest statement yet of the schedule this administration wants to be held to. NASA Watch's Keith Cowing notes the document leans on constitutional authority for a subject the constitution never mentions. NASA Watch
“Unless I missed something nothing in the constitution mentions the solar system or outer space.”
Amazon Leo — has fewer than 400 working broadband satellites up, after its three heavy-lift suppliers all stumbled: Vulcan grounded since February over a booster nozzle failure, New Glenn lost in a static fire explosion in May, Ariane 6 flying too rarely. The Vulcan return on 13 November carries 40 satellites in the VC6L configuration. The constellation is the clearest test of whether anyone but SpaceX can fly often enough to matter this decade. Amazon's FCC licence requires all 3,232 satellites in orbit by July 2029, from 77 contracted heavy-lift missions. SatNews
Open Cosmos — won the deadline extension it asked the ITU for, but the Radio Regulations Board's 3 November decision lets it keep regulatory priority for only one of the two networks it had registered, effectively cutting the planned constellation in half. Filing deadlines, not rockets, are quietly deciding which constellations exist at all, and this is one of the first European casualties. Two placeholder satellites went up on a Rocket Lab Electron in January 2026 to hold the claim. The full report is behind Space Intel Report's paywall. Space Intel Report
Cislunar Space System — is a US Air Force request for information, issued this week, for up to five spacecraft in lunar orbit, each with a government payload, ground segment and launch, wanted in late 2029 and described as seed vehicles for a bigger cislunar constellation later. It is the military drawing a line around the same place NASA wants its Moon Base, which makes it policy rather than procurement. The service plans up to five firm fixed-price preliminary design study contracts off the back of the responses. Behind The Black
Argo Space — is three ex-SpaceX brothers building space tugs that carry liquid water, split it with solar power and burn the hydrogen and oxygen. Its first demo, Navigator, flew in July but lost one of two roll-out solar arrays, went power-negative and never tested the propulsion. The telling part is the ride: two Chiron missions in 2027 for an undisclosed national security customer, neither on a Falcon 9, because rideshare slots are not for sale on the schedule they need. Argo has raised $20 million and signed with ispace in September to deliver a lunar relay satellite. Ars Technica
Tumbleweed — closed a €6.9M seed round led by Pact VC to build Oasis Beta, a research vehicle that can bring payloads back through the atmosphere, with missions from 2028. Its first satellite, Oasis Alpha, flew on SpaceX's Transporter-17 rideshare in July carrying payloads from four customers. Another entrant in the small reentry-capsule market, and a European one, which is where microgravity research gets cheap or does not happen. Three flights are booked for 2027, suborbital and orbital, including a demonstration of loading payloads late enough to fly live samples. Payload
Interstellar Technologies Zero — has been picked by JAXA under the Space Strategic Fund's commercial rocket launch demonstration programme, giving the Hokkaido startup's small launcher state backing as it works toward first flight. Japan has been short of its own small-launch capacity and leaning on foreign rides; this is the agency choosing a domestic alternative to fund. Aviation Week's Robert Wall reported the selection on 3 November; the full item sits behind the Aerospace Daily subscription. Aviation Week
ERMIS-3 — is a Greek cubesat that has established an optical communications link with a ground station at home, sending data down by laser rather than radio. It is the country's first successful optical link with a satellite in low Earth orbit. Laser downlinks are how small satellites get around crowded radio spectrum, and each national first adds another ground station to a network that is still thin. The demonstration is a step toward qualifying high-capacity laser terminals on spacecraft this small. SpaceWatch.Global
One takeaway
Set an alarm for Thursday 13:30 UTC. Menon and Kutryk start the final array spacewalk at 13:30 UTC on Thursday 5 November, with NASA+ coverage from 12:00 UTC; plan on about seven hours outside. It is the end of a job that started with a technology demonstration in 2017, and nothing else this week is worth losing sleep over: Swift's fall will be confirmed after the fact, and ESCAPADE's departure burn on Saturday has no live pictures. Starlust