September 28, 2027

Sidus Space to Launch LizzieSat-4 and LizzieSat-5 Together on SpaceX Bandwagon-6 (Source: Sidus Space)
Sidus Space announced that LizzieSat-4 and LizzieSat-5 are currently aligned with launch on the SpaceX Bandwagon-6 rideshare mission, targeted for no earlier than April 2027. Launch timing will depend on the outcome of qualification testing, spacecraft integration, and launch vehicle and rideshare mission readiness. (9/28)

Starship Launches Orbital Mission From Texas (Source: Space News)
SpaceX launched Starship Monday morning on the vehicle's first orbital flight. Starship/Super Heavy lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on the Flight 14 mission. One Raptor engine in the Starship upper stage shut down early on ascent, and SpaceX initially said it would not attempt an orbit insertion burn. The company reversed course several minutes later, though, successfully performing the burn. Starship will complete about six orbits during the 10-hour mission, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites, before splashing down off the coast of Chile. This is the first orbital mission for Starship after 13 suborbital flights dating back more than three years. (9/28)

China's Deep Blue Raises $300 Million for Launcher Development (Source: Space News)
Chinese launch company Deep Blue Aerospace has raised nearly $300 million. Chinese media reported last week that the company closed B6 and B7 rounds with a combined value of nearly 2 billion yuan ($297 million). The funds will go toward research, development and industrialization of the company’s two launch vehicle families, the medium-lift Nebula-1 and larger Nebula-2. A complete Nebula-1 vehicle was placed on a transporter-erector at a new liquid-propellant launch pad in Haiyang, Shandong province, in late March, but it has not flown and the company has not announced launch plans. Nebula-2 is slated for a first launch in 2027. (9/28)

KBR Spins Off Space Business as Trinzic (Source: Space News)
KBR is spinning off its defense and space business into a new company. KBR said last week that it named Michael LaRouche as president and chief executive-designate of Trinzic, the new name for KBR's Mission Technology Solutions business. Trinzic is scheduled to become a separately traded company Jan. 4. LaRouche's experience in the defense industry includes senior positions at Serco, SAIC, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. He takes over a company with more than $5 billion in annual revenue and 18,000 employees, with customers that include NASA and the Space Force. (9/28)

San Marino Signs Artemis Accords (Source: Space News)
San Marino is the latest country to sign the Artemis Accords. The small European country signed the accords Friday in the Italian city of Rimini. San Marino became the 76th country to sign the accords and the fourth to do so last week, after Albania, Croatia and Côte d'Ivoire. The wave of new signatories comes ahead of a meeting of Artemis Accords countries during the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey next week. (9/28)

A Black Hole Jet is Aimed at us … And it’s in Our Galaxy (Source: Earthsky)
All over the universe, black holes shoot jets out into space. And by coincidence, some of those jets are going to be aimed toward us. On September 22, 2026, astronomers said that — for the first — time they’ve found a black hole jet aimed toward Earth in our own galaxy. They’re calling this black hole system a microblazar. The black hole has a companion star that’s feeding material into the black hole. The black hole later expels that material in two jets, rushing outward at three quarters of the speed of light. One of those jets is aimed at us. The other we can see only because it’s smashing into a nearby molecular cloud, causing it to light up. (9/27)

‘China’s SpaceX’ Spins Off Amid Commercial Competition (Source: Jamestown)
The Chinese space sector saw its largest recorded equity deal in early 2026 when CASIC Sanjiang sold a 29.6 percent stake in ExPace—the company once billed as “China’s SpaceX.” This deal signals a shift from central state-owned enterprise (SOE) dominance toward sub-national state capital.

ExPace was once an industry trailblazer, but launch delays, a competitive commercial space ecosystem, and the reorganization of its parent company have left it behind competitors in the state-owned and private sectors. ExPace emerged from the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) defense-industrial base, and a representative of Wuhan Investment Holding Group, the firm involved in the 2026 deal, noted the strategic value of its “self-reliant and controllable” industrial chain. (9/26)

My SpaceX Moon Trip was Canceled. How Could I Return to an Ordinary Life? (Source: Irish Times)
Mid-pandemic, like much of the world, I was having an existential crisis. Each day, I frantically researched alternative careers away from photography that did not rely on human contact, increasingly despondent at losing the thing I loved: my “backstage pass to life”. A friend in tech pointed me towards a tweet from Elon Musk about dearMoon: a weeklong artists’ residency around the Moon aboard SpaceX’s Starship, funded by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, known as MZ.

It sounded far-fetched, but with nothing to lose, I applied. After months of being whittled down from a million applicants to a crew of eight, I got the call: “Will you go to the moon with me?” “Going to space” became my defining characteristic. It preceded me everywhere, dwarfing every other part of my personality and minimising anything I had achieved before it.

Then, in June 2024, MZ pulled out and cancelled the project, leaving us bereft and directionless. How do you return to ordinary life after preparing to leave the planet? Nothing could compete with the immensity of what had been promised; every other possible future felt diminished by comparison. Rhi-Entry emerged from that void: from trying to understand how I was supposed to resume life when the only future I wanted had disappeared, and everything else felt like a consolation prize. (9/27)

Claims That China’s BeiDou Satellite was Refueled in Orbit Could Change Space Race (Source: South China Morning Post)
Chinese researchers appear to have revealed a previously unknown satellite-to-satellite refueling operation in high Earth orbit, putting the country at the forefront of a technology that could reshape the space race. In a paper undergoing peer review, the team said China had “successfully provided room-temperature propellant refueling for a high-orbit BeiDou satellite for the first time”. The researchers from the state-funded Deep Space Exploration Laboratory gave no details about the operation. (9/27)

U.S. Secures Authority for Golden Dome in Greenland (Source: Space News)
The United States has secured authority to establish Golden Dome missile-defense capabilities in Greenland, opening the way for the Pentagon to expand a homeland defense network around Pituffik Space Base, where the U.S. Space Force already operates a ballistic missile warning radar. (9/26)

Aerospacelab Wins Contract to Supply Two Satellite Platforms to Lockheed Martin (Source: Space News)
Aerospacelab will supply two spacecraft platforms to Lockheed Martin under a new contract, adding the major U.S. defense contractor to the satellite manufacturer’s customer base. The agreement marks an expansion of Aerospacelab’s presence in the U.S. defense and space market. (9/27)