A house newsletter · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Thursday 12 November 2026 · Issue 50 · 4 min read
Isaacman buries Mobile Launcher 2; Long March 2D lofts Pathfinder; Japan funds a sovereign direct-to-phone constellation
What's hot
NASASpaceflight · yesterday
Isaacman explains why work on Mobile Launcher 2 has stopped
Takeaway: first flew in January 2024
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman went on NASASpaceflight's The Flame Trench to defend the recent Artemis calls: freeze the Space Launch System (SLS, the agency's Moon rocket) in one standard configuration, replace the cancelled Exploration Upper Stage with a stretched Centaur V, and stop building the second launch tower, Mobile Launcher 2. He argued a single tower is enough if crews fly even every eight months, and said pieces of the half-built structure, plus hardware from the dead upper stage, have gone to Blue Origin as government-furnished equipment. The partly built tower is to be moved into the Vehicle Assembly Building.
This is the Artemis argument the forums have been having all week: whether standardising makes SLS cheaper or simply postpones the real replacement. Isaacman's own answer is that industry's responses on commercial lunar transport pointed at the 2030s, with no end-to-end offer for 2028 or 2029. Centaur V is already in production for ULA's Vulcan and first flew in January 2024, but the stretched version NASA wants is still in development.
Flew
Long March 2D | Tanluozhe-1 — Lifted off from Launch Site 94 at Jiuquan at 11:41 UTC on Wednesday 11 November and successfully delivered the Tanluozhe-1 science satellite to sun-synchronous orbit.
Falcon 9 | USSF-627 — The target time moved from 02:35 to 04:36 UTC on Thursday 12 November, still inside the same overnight window, and the mission is listed as go.
What people are saying
Ars Technica · yesterday
Berger: NASA's lunar edge may be how it buys things
Takeaway: five lunar solicitations in seven days
Eric Berger at Ars Technica came away from the weekend's marathon lunar news conference arguing that the most important change is procurement, not hardware. NASA is asking industry what it can do rather than writing long requirements, and runs a two-step process borrowed from DARPA: a short white paper first, a full proposal only if NASA wants the idea. Mike Gold, Redwire Space's president and the former NASA official who set up the Artemis Accords, counted five lunar solicitations in seven days and called the pace unprecedented. Berger's caveat is that NASA is buying services from companies whose hardware does not yet fly.
It explains the flood of small Moon Base awards you have been reading since the weekend, and why startups with nothing in orbit keep appearing on the list. It also sets up the risk: an ecosystem of unproven suppliers instead of one or two primes. Isaacman said some of the money is repurposed from the shuttered Lunar Gateway, which received $2.6 billion under the 2025 act, and that single missions in the $200 million range can be added or dropped without risking the programme.
TeslaNorth · yesterday
Isar's chief will not rule out passing SpaceX
Takeaway: 15 times oversubscribed for 2028
Daniel Metzler, chief executive of Isar Aerospace, told a conference in Germany on Tuesday, in remarks reported by AFP, that over the next eighteen years he would not rule out his company ending up ahead of SpaceX. Isar has flown its Spectrum rocket twice from Andøya in Norway: the first attempt failed about 30 seconds after liftoff in March 2025, the second reached orbit on 5 September 2026, the first privately financed European company to do so. A third flight could come NET 26 November, inside a window the Norwegian air navigation provider Avinor has opened through 17 February.
Worth filing under bravado with receipts: the next Spectrum is the one that starts taking re-entry measurements on the first stage, which is the first real step toward reuse rather than a third expendable flight. Isar has not announced a date. Metzler said Isar is 15 times oversubscribed for 2028, with 14 customers to turn away for every rocket, and the European Space Agency's launcher challenge contract for Isar is worth 197.8 million euros.
“SpaceX was founded in 2002. Back then I was playing with Pokemon cards”
News
Rakuten AST — is the joint venture Rakuten Group and AST SpaceMobile announced on Tuesday 10 November to build Japan's own satellite network beaming cellular broadband to unmodified phones, with up to $1 billion of institutional funding over three years under the government's J-LEO programme. AST will build and supply the large-aperture satellites. AST's problem all year has been finding rides and cash; a national customer solves the second half of that. Rakuten Mobile plans full domestic service across Japan by the end of March 2029. SatNews
Starmind — SpaceX's planned orbital computing satellites got a new talking point: Musk replied on X that 100 GW of solar in space is worth roughly 800 GW on the ground, because terrestrial computing needs batteries for the night and backup generation in winter. No arithmetic was shown, and nothing is generating in orbit yet. Read it as a statement of how much Starship capacity SpaceX intends to spend on itself rather than on customers. The claim follows the SINGULUS solar-cell equipment deal announced on 10 November, whose first production line is due in the first half of 2027. TeslaNorth
“100GW in space is roughly equal to 800GW on Earth”
SEBIT — INNOSPACE's suborbital test rocket is being prepared for a second flight from the Alcântara Launch Center in Brazil, targeted NET 29 November, with a 26-day window running from 16 November to 11 December. The date depends on weather and operational readiness. One of the few suborbital tests worth staying up for, and the step the Korean company has to clear before its orbital vehicle. The window gives twelve days of margin either side of the 29 November target. SpaceWatch.Global
Revolv Space — which builds the drives that point satellite solar arrays, closed a €5 million Series A led by Deep Ocean Capital SGR on Wednesday 11 November, bringing total funding to €8.6 million since it was founded in 2022. Component suppliers are the quiet constraint on how fast anyone actually builds a constellation, and this is one of them buying floor space rather than announcing a constellation of its own. Revolv has 27 units operating in orbit and 83 delivered to eight customers; two-thirds of the money takes the Turin site from 500 to 1,500 square metres. SatNews
Senate panel votes on NASA's CFO and watchdog on 18 November. The Senate Commerce Committee heard Joshua Shoemaker, nominated as NASA chief financial officer, and Robert Steinau, nominated as inspector general, on 10 November, and announced it will vote on 18 November before sending them to the full Senate. These are the two people who would put honest numbers and independent audits behind the accelerated Artemis plan, and both chairs have been empty for years. NASA has had no confirmed CFO since January 2025 and no confirmed inspector general since Paul Martin left in late 2023; Steinau named the Moon return, the shift to commercial stations and cybersecurity as his priorities. SpaceNews
Rosatom — Chief executive Alexei Likhachev said after a government space strategy meeting on Tuesday 10 November that the company is studying five configurations for a lunar nuclear power plant of up to 10 kW and will choose one in 2027, with operation planned from the middle of the 2030s. Surface power is the part of any Moon base nobody can fake, and this is Roscosmos's answer to the fission reactors NASA and China are each scoping. Roscosmos signed a contract with the Lavochkin association last December aiming to have a lunar power station built before 2036. IT之家
EDEN-LUNA — DLR's containerised greenhouse for growing food on simulated lunar ground caught fire at an external contractor's site while being refurbished, delaying installation at the LUNA facility in Cologne from 2026 to the second quarter of 2027. DLR flagged the slip on 4 September but gave the reason only in a Bundestag answer published 20 October. A small analogue programme, but a reminder that life-support hardware slips for mundane reasons, and that the reason sometimes needs prising out. LUNA, run jointly by DLR and ESA since September 2024, has about 700 square metres of simulated lunar terrain. European Spaceflight
Cheap science missions are slow to produce science. Irene Klotz reported in Aviation Week on 11 November that NASA's push for many more low-cost science missions, mostly lunar, has yet to deliver much published science, set against a Planetary Society study of what missions returned per dollar. The piece sits behind an AWIN subscription. It is the counter-argument to the procurement story above: lots of small, fast awards are not the same as results. Mars Global Surveyor, which cost $550 million adjusted for inflation and flew from 1997 to 2006, scored the highest citations per dollar of any planetary mission in the study. Aviation Week
One takeaway
Point a torch skyward after sunset on Tuesday 17 November. Voyager 1 is due to become the first human-made object a full light-day from Earth, about 25.9 billion kilometres, on Wednesday 18 November, according to a report by The Register relayed by IT之家. NASA is inviting people to shine lights after sunset on Tuesday 17 November and blink the mission's three-letter call sign, VGR, in Morse code.
A spacecraft that lost contact for a day last month is still setting distance records almost fifty years after launch; this one costs nothing to join. IT之家