A house newsletter · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Thursday 5 November 2026 · Issue 44 · 5 min read
Swift burns up over Sumatra, Starfish loses Otter, NASA's Ka-band awards, and the last ISS array goes out today
What's hot
Spaceflight Now · yesterday
Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory
Takeaway: 12:39 UTC
NASA's gamma-ray burst hunter came back into the atmosphere on Wednesday at 12:39 UTC, near 3 degrees north and 99 degrees east over the North Sumatra region of Indonesia, on US Space Force tracking data that NASA later confirmed. The spacecraft had no engine of its own, and a puffed-up upper atmosphere dragged it down nearly 22 years after a Delta 2 launched it in November 2004.
You have followed the failed rescue for weeks, and this is the end of it: the first reentry of a big NASA observatory that ordinary observers got to watch, with people in Malaysia reporting the sighting, according to Leonard David. NASA paid Katalyst Space $30 million for the LINK tug meant to push Swift higher; LINK lost control of its orientation after launching on 3 July and the capture was abandoned on 19 August. The agency had put the risk of ground injury at about 1 in 2,100.
“NASA expected most of the spacecraft to burn up as it traveled through the atmosphere, but some components may have survived re-entry”
News
SSPICY — NASA's first bought-in commercial debris-inspection flight, finished a month after launch. Starfish Space lost the link to its Otter 24C spacecraft when a fault-protection error on the Astro Digital bus left the radio switched off, and NASA and Starfish have written it off as unrecoverable. That is the second robotic servicing job NASA has lost this autumn, after the tug that could not save Swift. A $15M mission, launched 1 October on Transporter-18; Starfish still holds a $52.5M Space Development Agency deorbit contract. Payload
Artemis III — reframed as a 14-day rehearsal in low Earth orbit: four astronauts on Orion, flown by SLS (Space Launch System) in 2027, docking in turn with a Blue Moon lander test article and a Version 3 Starship test article. The landing itself moves to Artemis IV in 2028. The 2027 flight you will stay up for is a docking test, not a Moon shot. Two SLS upper stages stay in play for Artemis IV: the interim cryogenic propulsion stage and a stretched ULA Centaur V. NASA
Artemis II — April's launch left two holes in the ionosphere, each stretching roughly 5,000 km across the American continent, and shifted GPS fixes by a few metres, according to a preprint by researchers at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. A rare measured side effect of a big launch, and a yardstick against Starship: they found the Artemis II disturbance up to ten times stronger than Starship test flights. The stronger effect came from the upper-stage burns at about 185 km, more than an hour after liftoff, not from the core stage. Space.com
NASA Ka-band relay awards — contracts to design commercial relay services that existing spacecraft can use without changing their onboard radios: Astranis up to $264.3 million, Global Enterprise Solutions up to $340.4 million, Viasat up to $460.9 million. This is the mechanism by which the TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite) fleet gets retired, the relay network the station and many older missions still talk through. Firm-fixed-price, running 4 November to 3 May 2027, with priced options out to 2029. NASA
Three crew members voted from orbit. Anil Menon, Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney filled in electronic ballots aboard the station for the US midterms. Each one is encrypted, comes down over NASA's relay satellites and a ground antenna in New Mexico, and is passed on to the county clerk in Harris County, Texas, where most astronauts are registered. It is the sort of station routine that rarely gets documented; Menon filmed his and posted it. Texas made it legal in 1997, and David Wolf voted that year from Mir. Space.com
“Yes, you can even vote from space! All three U.S. crew members had the privilege of voting from space station”
120th Congress — Democrats will run both chambers from 3 January, with the Associated Press projecting at least 54 Senate and 228 House seats. Every NASA and Space Force line now goes through a new majority, and Congress had already been pushing back on proposed NASA cuts. The unfinished business comes first: the continuing resolution runs out on 11 December, none of the twelve FY2027 appropriations bills has cleared, and the request on the table gives the Space Force $71 billion. SpacePolicyOnline
Alexander MacDonald — starts as president of the Canadian Space Agency on 16 November, succeeding Lisa Campbell, who had held the post since 2020. Canada has a call to make on Canadarm3 now that NASA has paused Gateway, and a CSA astronaut outside the station today; the new boss comes from policy and economics rather than engineering. He was NASA's first chief economist, serving until December 2024, and earlier ran the agency's ISS National Laboratory programme. SpacePolicyOnline
LeoLabs — the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital said on 4 November it intends to lend the space-tracking company $150 million, conditionally, to scale up production and deployment of its multimission phased array radars. Those radars feed much of the public picture of debris, close approaches and decaying satellites, which is the day-to-day material of a week like this one. Reported by Aviation Week's Vivienne Machi; the loan is aimed at building and fielding hardware. Aviation Week
Redwire — won a $20M DARPA contract under the Otter programme to fly a scaled-down SabreSat that will test an engine drawing its propellant from the thin air at very low altitude rather than carrying it all. A new class of vehicle in test: Otter aims at satellites that can live between 90 and 250 km, where drag usually ends a mission quickly. The subscale flight targets launch in late 2027 and lasts under a day; it follows a $44M Phase 2 award in November 2025. Payload
Globalstar — has told the FCC that the company building its satellites is about to own a rival fleet, and asked regulators to weigh that while they review Rocket Lab's $8 billion takeover of Iridium. Reported by Via Satellite. A live test of how far vertical integration is allowed to run in this industry, with the same firm as supplier and competitor. Seventeen replenishment buses are on order from Rocket Lab for Globalstar, with MDA Space as prime contractor, while the Iridium purchase is aimed at closing financially in early 2027. SatNews
Rassvet-4 — Russia's next broadband network, lodged with the ITU (International Telecommunication Union): 374 satellites, 22 in each of 17 planes at 800 km, from Bureau 1440 as a domestic answer to Starlink. Analyst Chris Forrester reported the filing. Worth noting because the generation already up there has not worked, and a filing is cheap while launches are not. Of 32 Rassvet-3 satellites flown from Plesetsk on two Soyuz missions in March and July, two reentered uncontrolled and the other 30 are stalled below the intended 800 km. SatNews
MIURA 5 — PLD Space announced on 30 October that it had fired the explosive flight termination system, the charges meant to end a flight that threatens people on the ground. It was done at Delta-V Energetics in Utah, which CEO Raúl Torres puts down to the paperwork around explosives in Europe. A serious European smallsat launcher clearing a gate it needs before it can fly from French Guiana. The first flight has slipped from 2026 to the first half of 2027; three vehicles exist, two for qualification and the flight article in integration. European Spaceflight