Sirotin Intelligence Briefing: September 21–26, 2026: The Space Force Buys GEO Inspectors and Flies a Fourth Starshield Batch in 43 Days, Starship's Orbital Debut Slips to September 28, and Italy Pays $5 Billion for Two Seats on the Moon

This week's Sirotin Intelligence analysis covers Space Systems Command's September 21 selection of Northrop Grumman and True Anomaly to build GHOST-R, a pair of geosynchronous reconnaissance satellites that will image other spacecraft up close ahead of a 2028 launch, alongside Saturday's USSF-385 launch from Vandenberg, the fourth suspected Starshield mission from the same pad in 43 days, and SpaceX's stacking of Starship Flight 14 on September 23 for an orbital attempt now set for no earlier than Monday, September 28. We also cover Italy's commitment of more than $5 billion to a Thales Alenia Space lunar habitat in exchange for two Italian astronauts on the surface, Jared Isaacman's declaration in Houston that NASA is finished "stitching together coalitions for the sake of coalitions," the Trump–Xi summit in Beijing that produced a two-month tariff extension and an AI hotline but no space agreements, the Air Force's elimination of every civilian post at the China Aerospace Studies Institute, and North Korea's two-shot test of the Hwasong-11Ma-1 hypersonic missile. Rounding out the week: L3Harris's $876 million Next Generation Jammer modification, Trump's decision to license Patriot interceptor production to Ukraine, Hubble Network's $200 million Series C, Google's first AI chips headed to orbit, NASA's $1.2 billion PRIMA telescope, and Christophe Bosquillon's column on the Chamber of Commerce's new LEO report and the FY27 reconciliation gamble.

🛡️ Defense Highlights

• Space Force picks Northrop and True Anomaly for GHOST-R – geosynchronous satellites that photograph other satellites, launching in 2028: Space Systems Command and the Defense Innovation Unit announced on September 21 that Northrop Grumman and True Anomaly will each build a satellite under the Geosynchronous High-Resolution Optical Space-Based Tactical Reconnaissance program, part of the service's RG-XX effort. Neither the companies nor the government disclosed contract values. The satellites are meant to deliver "high-resolution space-to-space imagery for characterizing resident space objects" in the geostationary belt, which in plain terms means getting close enough to a foreign spacecraft to determine what it is and what it carries. Northrop will fly its ESPASat-L bus with optical payloads from TRL11; True Anomaly will fly its Jackal spacecraft with the Mosaic command-and-control system and its own rendezvous and proximity sensors. Both platforms are expected to launch in 2028 and transfer to Space Force operations in 2029. "This approach burns down technical risk, drives down lifecycle costs, and gets vital capability to the warfighter faster," said Col. Bryon McClain, acting portfolio acquisition executive for space combat power. The award lands one week after Secretary Meink acknowledged on-orbit space control weapons for the first time; inspection satellites are the sensing layer that makes those weapons usable, since a shooter that cannot identify its target is a liability rather than a deterrent. Russia has flown co-orbital inspectors near U.S. spacecraft for the better part of a decade, and China's TJS and SJ series have been maneuvering in GEO for years. GHOST-R puts the United States in the same business, announced publicly and built on commercial buses.
• USSF-385 flies from Vandenberg – the fourth suspected Starshield launch from SLC-4E in 43 days: A Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4-East at 7:00 a.m. Pacific on Saturday, September 26, through Vandenberg fog, carrying a classified payload for the Space Force, and booster B1100 landed on Of Course I Still Love You roughly eight and a half minutes later on its tenth flight. SpaceX ended the webcast after the landing, as it does for classified missions, and neither the company nor the Space Force said what the rocket carried. Independent trackers counted 23 objects deployed, matching USSF-366 on August 15 and USSF-153 on September 10, which each released 23 satellites; USSF-259 on September 17 placed roughly 17 into a different orbit. Analysts read the pattern as the buildout of a Starshield constellation, SpaceX's government-hardened Starlink variant with NSA-compatible encryption and laser crosslinks, under a Space Force contract reported at $1.6 billion. USSF-385 was also the sixth Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg in September; the West Coast has become SpaceX's primary Falcon site as Cape Canaveral tilts toward Starship. The military logic is arithmetic. A proliferated architecture makes an anti-satellite campaign unaffordable for the attacker: destroying ten or twenty spacecraft out of several hundred leaves coverage intact, while every intercept spends a kinetic weapon the adversary has in limited supply. Four launches in six weeks suggests the Space Force wants that math in place before the FY27 budget fight is settled.
• Air Force cuts every civilian post at the China Aerospace Studies Institute – its director says the move "effectively ends CASI": The Air Force will eliminate all ten civilian positions at CASI effective October 1, according to reporting confirmed on September 22 and 23 by the Washington Times, Defense News, and Breaking Defense. CASI Director Brendan Mulvaney said civilians have always done the institute's research and that "nothing has been identified" as to which organization would take over its mission. An Air Force spokesperson countered that "the CASI mission continues, with the organization leveraging assigned military service members to accomplish its objectives," and said displaced civilians would be considered for reassignment. CASI was stood up in 2017 and chartered in 2021 to publish unclassified analysis of the PLA's air and space forces; in 2025 nearly 80,000 people visited its site and downloaded more than 50,000 reports, and its final publication analyzed Beijing's surveillance roadmap for monitoring the Pacific. Ryan Fedasiuk of the American Enterprise Institute called the decision "a devastating loss for the analytic community." The timing is hard to square with the department's own messaging. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the force the week before to prepare for combat in cislunar space, and the Space Force is buying GEO inspectors specifically to characterize Chinese spacecraft. CASI's output was the version of that threat picture that allied governments, industry, and congressional staff could read without a clearance, and as of this week no successor organization has been named.
• North Korea tests the Hwasong-11Ma-1 twice in one afternoon – 450 and 600-plus kilometers at 60 to 70 kilometers altitude: North Korea's Missile Administration Bureau launched two Hwasongpho-11Ma-1 hypersonic missiles from the Wonsan area on Sunday, September 20, the first at 3:00 p.m. local time to about 450 kilometers and the second at 5:50 p.m. to more than 600 kilometers, with Japanese estimates putting apogees at 60 and 70 kilometers respectively. The weapon is an upgraded version of the hypersonic glide system Pyongyang showed in 2025, with the sharp, dart-like glide body that distinguishes it from a conventional ballistic warhead. Kim Jong Un observed the test and called the result "the priceless fruit brought by a special force of the sci-tech group involved in the development of this important weapon system for a specific purpose." South Korea's Joint Chiefs confirmed the launches and said they retain an "overwhelming" response capability; Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said the North's "nuclear and missile development threatens the peace and stability of Japan and the international community." U.S. and South Korean analysts are still working the flight data. The relevant fact for missile defense planners is the altitude: a glide vehicle flying at 60 to 70 kilometers sits below the engagement envelope of most exoatmospheric interceptors and above the practical ceiling of most terminal systems, which is the gap that space-based tracking layers, and eventually Golden Dome's space-based interceptors, are meant to close.
• Golden Dome's director takes the argument public as a CSBA fellow calls for MDA to move under his authority:Gen. Michael Guetlein published an opinion piece in the Washington Post on September 24 explaining the architecture of the shield he has been building since the February 2025 executive order. Two days earlier, Thane Clare, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, argued in Defense News that "diffusion of responsibility is a recipe for failure" and that Guetlein cannot succeed while Aegis is split between the Navy and the Missile Defense Agency, Patriot sits with the Army, THAAD and Ground-Based Midcourse Defense are developed by MDA but operated by the Army, and airspace surveillance is divided between Northern Command and the FAA. Clare's remedy borrows from Admiral Rickover: move MDA under Golden Dome, give the director a dual-hatted role with the FAA, and consider consolidating the Aegis and Patriot programs under one office. The funding picture makes the argument timely. Nearly all of the $17.5 billion requested for Golden Dome in FY27 rides in the reconciliation package, with only about $400 million in the base budget, and the continuing resolution through December 11 freezes new starts. Guetlein has said in previous weeks that a CR could mean "no Golden Dome, no funding." A program with one director, no consolidated budget line, and dependencies on four services and two civilian agencies is exactly the kind of program that stalls in a CR. Whether Congress gives him the authorities Clare describes will say more about Golden Dome's schedule than any interceptor test.
• Russia's Kosmos-2558 inspector reenters – but the object that stalked an NRO satellite may still be in orbit:Kosmos-2558, launched August 1, 2022, on a Soyuz-2-1v from Plesetsk under Russia's Nivelir program, fell back to Earth on September 12, according to tracking data reported this week. The satellite spent its operational life shadowing USA-326, a classified National Reconnaissance Office spacecraft, and closed to within roughly 31 kilometers of it in April 2023. Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell cautioned that "the object that came down may not have been the real satellite," noting that a companion object cataloged as 2022-089C continues to maneuver. The Nivelir line has form: in 2020, Kosmos-2543 released a high-speed projectile near another Russian satellite in what U.S. Space Command called a weapons test, and Moscow's official line has always been that the spacecraft inspect Russia's own assets. The reentry closes one chapter of a program that has practiced close approaches to U.S. reconnaissance satellites for a decade, and it arrives the same week the Space Force ordered its own inspectors for the GEO belt.

Major Contract Awards This Week:

• L3Harris Technologies Inc. – Next Generation Jammer Low Band: An $876,440,942 cost-plus-incentive-fee, undefinitized contract modification for continued development of the Next Generation Jammer Low Band system for the Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force, including tooling, demonstration test article pods, and cybersecurity support, through fiscal year 2031.
• Trideum Corp. – Cyber electromagnetic activities: A $400,000,000 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity Army contract to find gaps and vulnerabilities in areas of cyber electromagnetic activities, through September 21, 2034.
• Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory – Space science research support: A $390,000,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity Air Force Research Laboratory contract for research support in space science and engineering, information technology, re-entry test beds, and combat systems, through September 2031.
• Raytheon Co. – AMRAAM parts: A $105,646,856 firm-fixed-price contract modification for Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile parts purchases, through August 31, 2027.
• Systems Planning & Analysis Inc. – Conventional Prompt Strike studies: A $48,295,159 cost-plus-fixed-fee task order from Navy Strategic Systems Programs for engineering and technical studies supporting the Conventional Prompt Strike and Future Regional Deterrence programs, through September 29, 2031.
• Gaylord Chemical Co. LLC – Hypergolic propellants: A $46,633,330 commercial firm-fixed-price requirements contract from Defense Logistics Agency Energy for the manufacture, purification, blending, analysis, packaging, and supply of specification-grade hypergolic propellants, through September 14, 2031.
• Impulse Space Inc. – Mira space vehicle: A $31,255,231 Small Business Innovation Research Phase III contract modification from Space Systems Command for one additional Mira space vehicle and integration, bringing the total contract value to $94,264,131, through March 31, 2030.

🌐 Policy, Geopolitical & Legal Developments

• Trump and Xi extend the tariff truce and open an AI hotline – Perdue calls Chinese satellite imagery for Iran "unacceptable": President Trump's state visit to Beijing from September 23 to 25 produced a two-month extension of the Busan tariff agreement through January 2027, a new U.S.–China Board of Trade to shield selected goods from disputes, and what U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer described as an AI dialogue modeled on "the red phone between the Kremlin and the White House during the Cold War," with a follow-up meeting planned within a month. China will also send two giant pandas to Zoo Atlanta. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg attended Thursday's state dinner, along with three Supreme Court justices. The harder conversations happened off the stage. U.S. Ambassador David Perdue said Trump told Xi that China's assistance to Iran is "unacceptable to us," and separately noted that Chinese entities had provided satellite imagery to Iran ahead of strikes. Perdue said there was "no change" in U.S. policy toward Taiwan. On AI, Trump repeated that the United States must beat China while resisting regulation; Xi said AI development should remain "always under human control." No space agreements were announced and none were expected. The imagery disclosure is the item to file. It puts on the record, from the U.S. ambassador, that Chinese remote sensing has supported Iranian targeting during a war in which U.S. forces are taking fire, which is the scenario the Space Force's counterspace posture and the Chamber of Commerce's LEO report both assume.
• Isaacman's "lengthy note" and the Off World stage – Artemis III targets summer 2027, an acceleration update comes in October, and NASA is "done" with coalitions for their own sake: NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an agency-wide message on September 21 laying out the state of play: Crew-13 launches within two weeks, Artemis III is targeting summer 2027 with two additional landing opportunities in 2028 but currently sits about 90 days behind schedule ahead of a year-end tanking test, the SR-1 Freedom spacecraft will fly the first U.S. space reactor since 1965 in late 2028, the agency has pivoted from Gateway to a lunar surface base, and the Exploration Upper Stage has been redirected toward a larger-tank Centaur V that serves SLS, Vulcan, and crewed missions alike. He cited $10 billion in additional funding under the WFTCA for accelerating timelines and wrote that "we are not going to sit idly by, sit on our hands, and wait for others to deliver." At Payload's Off World summit in Houston on September 24 and 25, Isaacman promised an "Artemis acceleration update" in early October, said the lunar south pole has "limited parking spots," and told the room NASA is done "stitching together coalitions for the sake of coalitions." Partnerships, he said, must deliver programmatic value to the United States in a race where losing the Moon to China would erode allied confidence in American technology. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, whose agency had invested in three Gateway components before the pause, has responded by calling for European leaders to consider independent crewed spaceflight and sovereign lunar missions. Isaacman's counterweight is that more than half of the Artemis Accords signatories have committed scientific or technological payloads to lunar surface missions. The standard he set is programmatic value, which in practice means hardware or funding.
• Italy commits more than $5 billion to the first lunar habitat and secures two astronauts on the surface – Albania becomes the 73rd Artemis Accords signatory: Isaacman confirmed in Houston that Italy is "committing over $5 billion to building one of the first habitation modules" and that "as a result, you're going to see two Italian astronauts on the surface of the Moon." Thales Alenia Space is building the Multi-Purpose Habitat under contract to the Italian Space Agency: a pressurized module about 3 meters wide and 6 meters long, roughly 15 tonnes, able to support two astronauts for 7 to 30 days, on wheels so it can be repositioned. It passed NASA's System Requirements Review in May 2026, targets Preliminary Design Review in 2027, readiness in 2032, and launch in 2033. The March 2026 Statement of Intent between NASA and ASI guaranteed one Italian astronaut; the second seat is the return on the additional investment. Isaacman called it "the first real habitation module that makes its way to the lunar surface" and the model for how NASA wants partnerships structured from here on. Separately, Albania's Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Ferit Hoxha signed the Artemis Accords at NASA headquarters on September 21, making Albania the 73rd signatory. Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson presided, and Hoxha said the step "affirms its commitment to peaceful, transparent, sustainable, and cooperative exploration of space." The two announcements show the two tiers of the current NASA model: Albania joins the Accords with a signature, and Italy, by Isaacman's account, gets the first habitation module on the surface and the crew allocation that came with paying for it.
• Trump approves Patriot production licenses for Ukraine – after Kyiv's 1,600-drone night over Russia and Moscow's 295-drone reply: Volodymyr Zelensky said on September 25 that Trump told him at their last meeting, "yes, I have made a final decision. Ukraine will receive licences for the production of Patriot missiles." Ukraine has faced acute interceptor shortages since February, when the U.S.–Israeli war with Iran diverted Patriot supply, and Zelensky has said Ukraine needs 5% of U.S. Patriot output to get through the winter. Licensed production would take more than a year to stand up, so the decision does not solve the winter problem; it does end a reversal from July, when Trump called the idea "pretty cool" and then walked it back. The week opened with Ukraine's largest drone operation of the war: on September 20, the final day of Russia's election, Russian officials claimed to have intercepted more than 1,600 Ukrainian drones in a single night, 450 of them headed for Moscow, and Ukrainian strikes hit refineries at Moscow, Nizhnekamsk, and Yaroslavl over the following days. Russia answered with 295 drones in one night and, per the Institute for the Study of War, shifted targeting toward Ukrainian data centers and telecommunications infrastructure after earlier campaigns against ports and railways, using newly fielded jet-powered drones that evade some Ukrainian defenses. A strike in Kyiv on September 25 killed a 14-year-old; another in Odesa killed one more. Denmark's Defense Intelligence Service separately warned of escalating Russian hybrid attacks against NATO members, citing a September 14 incident in which a Russian frigate fired flares at a Danish military helicopter over the Baltic. The through-line for space readers is the same one Christophe raises below: every Patriot Ukraine builds and every interceptor spent over Israel comes out of a production base that the Pentagon's own acquisition chiefs say hit "strategic inventory shortfalls" during Epic Fury.
• Iran uses UNGA to demand sanctions relief as a condition to end the war – Tehran says it hopes Washington returns to the MoU before the midterms: Iranian officials at the UN General Assembly this week conditioned an end to the war on the United States lifting sanctions, and Tehran said publicly that it hopes the U.S. returns to the June 17 memorandum of understanding before the November elections. That MoU, which was meant to reopen the Strait of Hormuz over a 60-day negotiating window, collapsed when Trump declared it "over" on July 8, and both sides have exchanged fire since under Operation Epic Fury, Israel's Operation Roaring Lion, and Iran's Operation True Promise IV. President Pezeshkian used his UNGA remarks to argue it is unfair that Israel holds nuclear weapons while IAEA inspectors monitor Iranian facilities. Inside Iran, Brig. Gen. Hossein Zarifi, a senior IRGC commander, was killed in clashes near the Pakistan border. Trump, for his part, praised Middle East partners for "successes" in the region and delivered the Iran message to Xi in person. The Pentagon's inspector general has already been told by acquisition leadership that Epic Fury's weapons expenditures produced "strategic inventory shortfalls" and exposed "industrial base bottlenecks," and the department still has an unresolved supplemental request to cover the operation's costs. The war's space dimension is now explicit on two fronts: Chinese imagery to Iranian targeteers, and a Space Force whose FY27 growth depends on a reconciliation package that the same war is competing for.

🛰️ Technology & Commercial Developments

• Starship Flight 14 is stacked, fueled, and waiting on the FAA – first orbital attempt slips to September 28: Super Heavy Booster 21 rolled to the Starbase pad on September 21, and SpaceX stacked Ship 41 on top on September 23 after a five-and-a-half-hour transport and lift, producing a 124-meter vehicle ready for the program's first true orbital flight. The stack completed a wet dress rehearsal on September 24. Launch is now targeted for Monday, September 28, in a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CDT, and as of Saturday evening SpaceX still did not have the Federal Aviation Administration license it needs to fly; a temporary flight restriction is in place over Starbase through October 7. The mission profile calls for an orbital insertion burn about 25 minutes after liftoff, with Ship 41 reaching roughly 275 kilometers, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites (up from 20 on Flight 13, which did not reach orbit), completing about six orbits over nearly ten hours, and splashing down in the Pacific west of Chile. Booster 21 will come down in the Gulf; neither stage will attempt a tower catch. Changes since Flight 13 include additional tile fasteners, curved tiles to reduce heating, reused tiles from Ship 40, improved engine filtering, and new relight software on the booster. This is the flight that was scheduled for September 15, then September 22, and it remains the single most consequential launch on the manifest: Starlink V3's per-satellite throughput, Starshield's next generation, and Artemis III's tanking test all sit downstream of Starship reaching orbit and coming back on purpose. For scale, Starlink now counts 12,962 satellites launched and 11,121 operational, and 2026 has seen 230 orbital launch attempts worldwide with 223 successes as of this week.
• Hubble Network raises $200 million at a $1.6 billion valuation to connect Bluetooth chips to satellites: The Seattle startup announced a $200 million Series C on September 23, led by Smith Point Capital with participation from Seraphim, Carthona Capital, Earthshot Ventures, Y Combinator, and RPM Ventures, bringing total funding to $300 million. Hubble operates six satellites in low Earth orbit today and plans a 60-satellite constellation by 2030, built with Muon Space, that lets standard Bluetooth Low Energy chips in package trackers, vehicles, and industrial equipment transmit directly to orbit; the network also folds in nearly 90 million ground-based scanners. The pitch is cost: a 50-cent chip and a roughly $4 monthly subscription in place of a cellular tracker. Pilot customers include Samsara. CEO Alex Haro, who co-founded Life360, said "when we said we'd connect Bluetooth chips to satellites, most of the industry said the physics wouldn't allow it." CTO Ben Wild invented Amazon Sidewalk. The company employs about 70 people. Hubble's defense relevance is indirect but real: a global, low-power, ground-station-independent way to locate tagged assets is the kind of dual-use logistics capability that TRANSCOM and the Defense Logistics Agency have been trying to buy for years, and Hubble now has the capital to build the constellation out.
• Google sends four TPUs to orbit on October 1 – Project Suncatcher's first test of an AI data center in space:Google confirmed this week that a prototype satellite designated MVP will fly on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare on October 1 carrying four sixth-generation Trillium tensor processing units and roughly one kilowatt of solar power. The test checks whether the hardware survives launch loads of 10 g sustained, radiation exposure exceeding a five-year mission dose, and thermal management without air, along with short-range laser links between spacecraft. Ground testing at UC Davis's Crocker Nuclear Research Center produced a result Google did not expect: "These kinds of tests rarely go according to plan, so we were pleasantly surprised that the hardware was able to withstand the forces," said Travis Beals, senior director of Project Suncatcher. Google originally planned two custom satellites for 2027 and pulled the first test forward by integrating onto an existing bus; the 2027 pair will demonstrate inter-satellite laser communication. The long-term concept is a constellation of orbital compute that draws up to eight times the solar energy of a terrestrial facility. Whether the economics close is an open question, and the first flight will only run briefly. Google is the first hyperscaler to put its own accelerators on orbit to find out.
• Starfish Space readies the first full-scale Otter for a NASA-funded debris inspection – with $90 million in Space Force and SDA work behind it: Starfish Space will launch its first full-scale Otter servicing vehicle on Transporter-18 in October under a $15 million NASA contract for the SSPICY mission, which the company describes as "the first agency-funded commercial debris inspection mission." Otter will approach defunct satellites in low Earth orbit and measure spin rate, spin axis, and surface condition, the data a future removal or servicing mission needs before it can dock. The company has flown two subscale demonstrators, Otter Pup 1 in 2023 and Otter Pup 2 in June 2025, and holds a GEO life-extension contract with Intelsat, a $37.5 million award from Space Systems Command, and a $52.5 million Space Development Agency deorbiting contract. Read alongside GHOST-R, the pattern is that the government is now buying rendezvous and proximity operations from at least three commercial vendors across two orbital regimes. Inspection, servicing, deorbit, and counterspace all depend on the same skill set, which is why the same vendors keep appearing across NASA, SSC, and SDA awards.
• NASA confirms PRIMA – a $1.2 billion far-infrared telescope and the first Probe Explorer, launching in 2033:NASA announced on September 24 that the Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics has entered Phase B with a project cost cap of $1.2 billion excluding launch, targeting a 2033 launch. PRIMA carries a cryogenically cooled 1.8-meter telescope, the PRIMAger imaging polarimeter, and the FIRESS high-resolution spectrometer, and will study star and planet formation and black hole growth in the far-infrared band that neither Hubble nor Webb covers. JPL leads, with Goddard and Marshall supporting and contributions from Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom; Caltech's IPAC will run the science center. PRIMA establishes a new Probe Explorers class between the Explorer missions and the flagships, and it is a new astrophysics start in a year when the White House requested $18.8 billion for NASA against the $24.4 billion Congress kept in place under the continuing resolution. The partner list also fits the Isaacman model: six foreign agencies are on PRIMA because each is contributing hardware.
• Europe's small launchers push toward a UK orbital first – ESA funds RFA at SaxaVord as HyImpulse targets October 5: ESA, through the UK Space Agency's Boost! program, awarded Rocket Factory Augsburg €2.7 million on September 24 to build test facilities at SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland for Helix engine hot-fire tests and integrated RFA ONE second stages, a step toward the first vertical orbital launch from UK soil. SaxaVord has meanwhile abandoned the shared launch-rail concept known as Project SkyReach, so HyImpulse will bring its own rail for the SR75 suborbital rocket, now targeting an October 5 flight. The DLR–CNES–JAXA Callisto reusable demonstrator completed acceptance testing of its carbon-fiber nose cone at the Guiana Space Centre, but its first hop has slipped from 2026 to 2027. ESA's Industry Space Days at ESTEC on September 16 and 17 drew a record 3,100 participants from roughly 1,500 companies and nearly 10,000 prescheduled meetings. China, for comparison, launched the 26th batch of its satellite internet constellation on a Long March-8A from the Hainan commercial launch site on September 23, with the satellites reaching their planned orbits. The difference is one of stage: Europe is still funding test stands for its first orbital launchers from UK soil, while China is deploying constellation batches from a commercial pad it built for that purpose.

💭 A Word From Christophe Bosquillon

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just dropped a new report "Low Earth Orbit: The New High Ground of National Security." The Chamber looks at how commercial innovation is reshaping America's national security space architecture, and what policymakers must do to sustain U.S. leadership.

The report argues space has become essential infrastructure for both America's economy and its national security. As demonstrated by the war in Ukraine, as threats evolve, low Earth orbit (LEO) is playing an increasingly important role in how the U.S. communicates, gathers intelligence, tracks emerging threats, and maintains its military advantage. The future of American space power is not a choice between LEO and traditional architectures in medium or geosynchronous Earth orbit.

It is a layered, interoperable architecture that combines the strengths of all three while drawing on the innovation and capacity of America's commercial space industry. To maintain that advantage, the U.S. Chamber calls on policymakers to strengthen the space industrial base, expand access to launch infrastructure, prioritize commercial capabilities where they already exist, promote open and interoperable systems, and pursue policies that allow industry-led innovation and space safety practices to scale.

But how do you square this with on-going Department of War closed-door briefings with Congress, for a $1.1 trillion discretionary FY-27 request, $350 billion in proposed mandatory funding for modernization initiatives that would require congressional action outside the annual appropriations process, billions in previously enacted reconciliation money still being spent, and an unresolved request for additional funding to cover the cost of military operations against Iran?

According to reports, "The Pentagon's acquisition leadership has separately told the department's inspector general that weapons expenditures during Operation Epic Fury resulted in "strategic inventory shortfalls" and exposed "industrial base bottlenecks." If reconciliation delivers less than requested, the department and Congress could face decisions about which priorities migrate into the regular appropriations process, which are reduced and which are delayed."

Of the Space Force's $71B request, $59B comes from the DoW base budget, $12B are funded through reconciliation. In the FY27 budget request, nearly all the $17.5B being sought for Golden Dome will be in the reconciliation request, with around $400M in the base request.

For the DoW, to accelerate weapons production and modernization, while operating under temporary funding, remaining unsure of congressional decisions, is as dangerous as it is dysfunctional. Further, the same Space Force which prove instrumental in Operation Epic Fury should not have to pay the political cost of the Iran conflict.

Have a great Space Week ahead!