A house newsletter · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Tuesday 3 November 2026 · Issue 42 · 4 min read
Swift falls within days; Kinetica-2 lofts 18 Qianfan; Electron hits 99; Northwood raises $375M
What's hot
Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — NASA's gamma-ray burst telescope, in orbit since November 2004, is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry in the next few days after a commercial re-boost attempt failed. Its operations team at Penn State has already commanded it off. Most of the aluminium structure will burn away; the heavy, dense parts are the ones worth tracking.
This is the first big uncontrolled reentry of a well-known science spacecraft in a while, and the one the forums will be watching hour by hour. It is also the cleanest example yet of a debate the beat keeps circling: when a satellite has no thrusters, the end of the mission is decided by solar activity, not by flight controllers. On Oct. 20 NASA put Swift's orbit at 171 miles (275 km) and the spacecraft, roughly 3,300 pounds, in safe mode; its ground track stays within about 21 degrees of the equator, mostly ocean but crossing parts of Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Latin America. Space.com
Flew
Kinetica-2 Y2 — lifted off from Launch Area 140 at Jiuquan on Tuesday at 00:15 UTC with eighteen Qianfan broadband satellites, reaching polar orbit successfully on the tri-core rocket's second flight.
Electron / The Sea God Surveys — lifted off from Mahia, New Zealand on Monday at 16:41 UTC with an iQPS radar satellite, deployed at 575 km about 56 minutes later; mission success.
Falcon 9 / USSF-432 — the classified Space Force flight from Vandenberg's SLC-4E did not go on Monday and is now NET Saturday 00:46 UTC, with a four-hour window.
What people are saying
Unconfirmed: SpaceX is said to be circling Boost Mobile. The Washington Post reports that SpaceX has been talking to EchoStar about buying Boost Mobile, or at least renting its network, as a way of turning Starlink Mobile into a retail phone service in the United States. Elon Musk is said to have met EchoStar chairman Charlie Ergen last month. Neither company has confirmed any of it, and no price, structure or timeline has been put on the table.
Treat it as a rumour, because that is what it is, but it is the one the industry crowd chewed over all Monday: a launch company that already owns spectrum buying its way into the ground side of mobile. Note too that Boost owns no towers of its own, so AT&T and T-Mobile would likely get a say. The groundwork is already laid: last September EchoStar struck a roughly $17 billion cash-and-stock deal handing SpaceX its AWS-4 and H-block spectrum. TeslaNorth
China puts its crewed Moon schedule on a slide, in public. At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, lunar programme chief designer Wang Xiang laid out the mission-by-mission route to a landing before 2030: an uncrewed Long March 10A with Mengzhou to low Earth orbit in early 2027, a Long March 10 flying the Lanyue lander in 2028, a dual uncrewed rehearsal in 2029, then the crewed landing. Because China has no Saturn V-class rocket, crew and lander go up separately and meet in lunar orbit.
Until now outsiders have had to infer Chinese progress from factory photos and test stands. A published sequence gives you dates to hold the programme against, and the next checkpoint is close: that 2027 Mengzhou test article is already at Wenchang. Berger notes what the plan leaves out: there is no Apollo 8-style crewed loop around the Moon before the landing attempt. Ars Technica
News
Northwood Space — closed a $375 million Series C at a $2 billion valuation, co-led by a16z and DFJ Growth, to mass-produce the flat phased-array ground terminals it calls Portals and buy sites abroad. Ground stations are the quiet bottleneck behind every constellation you watch launch, and this is the biggest bet yet that operators would rather rent capacity than build dishes. In a recent test ten arrayed Portals matched what a 20-foot dish delivers. Payload
BEST!2 Flight Demonstrations — is ESA's new call, published on 27 October, to pay European industry to actually fly reusable first stages rather than only study them: recovery and re-flight demonstrated at system level. For anyone who has watched Themis and Callisto creep along, this is the step from paper to hardware, though budgets and dates are not published yet. The first BEST! round funded ArianeGroup, which proposed turning MaiaSpace's first stage into reusable boosters for a later Ariane 6, and Isar Aerospace, working on a Spectrum demonstrator. European Spaceflight
Starfall — is SpaceX's newly opened commercial offer to fly microgravity payloads inside Starship: 1,000 kg of payload mass, 1 kW of payload power, Ethernet and Starlink connectivity for the whole flight, aimed at drug crystals, tissue work and semiconductor growth. It tells you what SpaceX thinks Starship will be doing commercially before it is catching ships routinely. The page carries no price and no first flight date, though the Q3 results claim three Starfall missions already signed. TeslaNorth
Suncatcher — is Google's prototype orbital-computing satellite, built by Planet Labs and launched on 1 October, which has now run an AI model on its onboard chips and sent the answer down over a ground station at Svalbard. It is a spacecraft event rather than a software one: the real test ahead is whether the processors survive heat and radiation. Power is the limit, with up to 1 kilowatt available, so only one of the four chips can run at a time, for roughly 20 minutes. The Next Web
Lihong-2 — is CAS Space's fully reusable suborbital vehicle, and a deputy chief designer has now said it should attempt a recovery flight above 100 km in the first quarter of 2027, feeding the reuse work on the Kinetica-2 orbital rocket that flew this morning. It is 18 m long, 3.35 m wide and 60 tonnes at liftoff, and is pitched as carrying seven people or three tonnes. The debut flight is to fly an automated protein-crystal pharmaceutical rig, an uncrewed robot and wearable monitors for future space tourists. IT之家
Monarch and Morpho — are the two vehicles Swiss startup Stellar Alpina has just revealed: an orbital tug and a small Moon lander, both built around rotating detonation engines, a combustion design that squeezes more performance out of the same propellant. Europe has no CLPS-style commercial lunar delivery programme, so a 50 kg-class lander is a bid to create one. Monarch is sized for 6,000 m/s of delta-V at 1,000 kg wet mass, burning hydrogen peroxide and propane, with an in-orbit demo targeted for 2029. Payload
Voyager 1 — reaches one light day from Earth on 18 November, meaning a radio command takes a full day to arrive: 16.09 billion miles out, 49 years after its September 1977 launch. It remains the most distant human-made object. Aviation Week
Station's last roll-out array goes out on Thursday. Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and NASA's Anil Menon will install the eighth and final roll-out solar array on the starboard truss, a job expected to take about seven hours and closing out the station's long power upgrade. It is the end of the campaign you have been following walk by walk, and the last planned EVA of this series. Finishing it lifts the station's generating capacity from 160 kilowatts to about 215 kilowatts, roughly 30 percent. NASA
One takeaway
Set an alarm for Thursday 12:00 UTC: the last array goes out. Joshua Kutryk of CSA and NASA's Anil Menon step outside to fit the eighth and final roll-out solar array, on the starboard truss, closing a campaign that has run for years. The walk is due to start at 12:00 UTC on Thursday and last about seven hours; NASA+ coverage opens at 10:30 UTC.
This is the one worth getting up for this week, and the last chance to watch an array installation on the ISS. Finished, station power generation rises from 160 kilowatts to roughly 215. NASA