A week defined by institutional money moving into space and by an International Astronautical Congress that worked as a negotiating table: Mexico structured US$700 million for its sovereign space program, ESA signed with Vast and widened its agreement with India, and Satellogic put its new satellite generation into orbit. On the science side, a NASA telescope confirmed the first planet born from the ashes of a dead star, and the Crew-13 astronauts set a record for the fastest docking ever by a U.S. spacecraft.
Economy, investment and industry
1. Mexico structures US$700 million for its sovereign space program
New York financial-exchange startup Nebex and Mexican manufacturer Thrusters Unlimited announced a partnership to channel US$700 million into strategic space capabilities for the Mexican state: Earth observation, telecommunications and satellite systems. Nebex — founded in 2025 by former Axiom Space executives Tejpaul Bhatia and Anand Subramanian — describes itself as a "clearinghouse for global space procurement": it connects sovereign buyers with commercial suppliers and makes money on transaction fees and spreads. Thrusters Unlimited brings local expertise and access to Mexican procurement programs. The company had just launched a €100 million industrial-return initiative in France and secured a banking relationship with JP Morgan. It is by far the year's strongest signal that institutional capital has started to see Latin America as a buyer of space capability, not only as a market for services. Payload Space
2. Satellogic debuts its Merlin generation and confirms contact with four new satellites
The Argentine-founded company placed four satellites in orbit on October 1 aboard a Falcon 9, and on October 2 confirmed that all four had communicated correctly with its ground station network, with every subsystem healthy. The technological leap is Merlin.01, the first of a new generation offering 1-metre resolution and 10 spectral bands compatible with Europe's Sentinel satellites, covering an effective swath of roughly 170 kilometres per pass. Alongside it fly two NewSat Mark VI units (Gladys West and Édmée Chandon), which add inter-satellite links so two spacecraft can exchange data directly while in orbit, and one Mark V (Esmeralda Mallada). The stated goal: re-imaging the entire surface of the Earth once per day at metre-class resolution during the second half of 2027. In parallel, the company is pushing its Sovereign Space Systems program, which offers governments dedicated satellite capacity under more direct control. Espacio Tech
3. Satlyt raises US$8 million to put artificial intelligence inside other people's satellites
The company, based in Nairobi and Sunnyvale, closed an US$8 million seed round led by non sibi ventures, with TLCOM, Antler, Launch Africa Ventures, Enza Capital, Slauson & Co. and Gaingels among others, taking its total well past US$10 million. The model is elegant: instead of building satellites, Satlyt injects AI inference capability into third-party spacecraft — pre-loading software before launch or uploading it in flight — so the satellite processes data in orbit and downlinks only the useful output rather than tonnes of raw data. Founded in 2024 by Rama Afullo (ex-SpaceX and Google), it had already won a US$4 million NASA STTR contract and in May demonstrated Google's Gemma model running aboard a satellite. Its target: being on 30% of all non-Starlink satellites by the end of the decade. Payload Space
4. The U.S. Air Force funds Sierra Space's "Ghost" to deliver cargo down from orbit
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) awarded Sierra Space an expanded study under its REGAL program (Rocket Experimentation for Global Agile Logistics) to develop Ghost, a reentry vehicle able to sit in an orbital warehouse for up to five years and, on command, deliver cargo to any point on Earth in under 90 minutes. Use cases range from rescue kits for downed pilots to medical supplies in disasters. The economic crux is cost: each vehicle currently runs in the "tens of millions," and the company is targeting "single-digit millions" per unit. Drop tests have already been completed at Kennedy Space Center, with more testing planned over the next year. The contract value was not disclosed. SpaceNews
5. ESA uses the IAC to close deals: a memorandum with Vast and an extension with India
At the 77th International Astronautical Congress (Antalya, October 5–9, themed "The World Needs More Space"), the European Space Agency signed a memorandum of understanding with Vast on low Earth orbit cooperation — an explicit piece of its preparation for the post-International Space Station era — and extended its cooperation agreement with India's ISRO, widening it to human spaceflight, lunar exploration, climate and science missions. Director General Josef Aschbacher framed all of it around the discussion Europe will have at December's Intermediate Ministerial Meeting in Rome: European autonomy in exploration, including the possible development of an independent astronaut transport capability. Bilateral meetings were also held with NASA and the Canadian, Australian and UAE space agencies. ESA
6. Türkiye makes the most of hosting the IAC: Antalya Declaration, a Somali spaceport and HÜRSAT-2
The host country used the stage to position itself. The Turkish-led Antalya Declaration was adopted by 21 countries and commits signatories to the peaceful, responsible and cooperative use of space. On infrastructure, the government confirmed it is building a spaceport in Somalia to support African space capabilities, and that the spacecraft for its first Moon mission is now more than 80% domestically manufactured and in testing for an early 2027 launch. On the industrial side, Turkish Aerospace and Roketsan signed the contract for HÜRSAT-2, a mass-producible Earth observation satellite slated to launch on the homegrown ŞİMŞEK-1 rocket. Türkiye signed the Artemis Accords in August and is hosting their annual principals' meeting. Payload Space
7. Skyrora pushes its first orbital flight to 2030: a lesson about demand, not rockets
UK launch startup Skyrora moved its first orbital launch target from the fourth quarter of 2026 to 2030. The diagnosis from COO Jack-James Marlow is the most valuable data point here for any country weighing its own launcher industry: the brake was not technical but commercial and infrastructural — thin real demand for sovereign UK launch capacity, and "the technology outpacing the regulations and the actual physical locations for spaceports." The company has raised roughly US$65.9 million in venture capital since 2017 and estimates it needs about double that to reach orbit; rather than a mega-round, it is betting on revenue from selling in-house components, renting test facilities and offering 3D-printing services to other industries. It has held a launch licence since August 2025 but competes for pads at SaxaVord with Germany's HyImpulse and Rocket Factory Augsburg. Payload Space
Science, exploration and missions
8. Crew-13 reaches the Space Station with the fastest docking ever by a U.S. spacecraft
The Crew Dragon lifted off from Florida on October 1 and docked at the Harmony module 7 hours and 55 minutes after launch, a record for a U.S. vehicle: the previous mark for a cargo Dragon was 12 h 33 min (November 2024), and for a crewed flight 14 h 43 min (Crew-11, August 2025). Aboard are Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney (NASA), Joshua Kutryk (Canadian Space Agency) and Sergey Teteryatnikov (Roscosmos), for a stay of about six months. The absolute record still belongs to Russia's Soyuz, at 3 h 3 min in May 2020, achieved through a more aggressive trajectory rather than a faster spacecraft. Spaceflight Now · Space.com
9. The "phoenix planet": first confirmed world born from the ashes of a dead star
A team led by Jamie Williams and Boris Gänsicke (University of Warwick) with Nicholas Stone (University of Wisconsin-Madison) confirmed in Nature Astronomy on October 5 the first second-generation planet detected around a white dwarf. The world — a Jupiter-sized gas giant orbiting in just 4.4 days — accompanies the star HS 0209+0832, some 790 light-years away, and was found with TESS, NASA's planet-hunting telescope. The giveaway is chemical: elevated zinc and copper, and niobium a thousand times more abundant than in the Sun, indicating the planet formed from material the dying star shed during its red giant phase. "They're incredibly rare, and finding one around a white dwarf was completely unexpected," Williams said. Space.com · Phys.org
10. Blue Origin unveils the "Power Tower": 20 metres of solar arrays for the lunar south pole
On October 4 the company showed its Power Tower, a vertically deployed solar mast 20 metres tall and able to deliver more than 10 kilowatts on the lunar surface. It is designed to power its future base at the Moon's south pole, and according to the company its modular architecture will support surface networks that carry power beyond the lander to the assets that need it most. The technology descends from LAMPS (Lunar Array Mast and Power System), developed by its subsidiary Honeybee Robotics, which took part in NASA's VSAT project. An Earth-based deployment test was carried out on July 22, 2026. The Moon base project is in Phase One — through 2029 — with operations expected from 2032. Surface power is the real bottleneck for any permanent lunar presence: without steady kilowatts there is no ice mining, no regolith processing and no habitability. Space.com
11. The Oklahoma crater gets 100 million years younger — and changes mass extinctions
Researchers at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin, re-dated the Ames impact structure buried beneath Oklahoma: it is not 467.5 million years old as believed, but roughly 370 million. The shift pulls it out of the Ordovician Meteor Event and places it alongside the Frasnian–Famennian mass extinction of about 372 million years ago, which devastated marine life. The method was the key: instead of conodont fossils — which, lead researcher Elizabeth Catlos notes, "were probably already millions of years old" when the asteroid hit — the team used U-Pb zircon radioisotopic dating, with cathodoluminescence and electron backscatter diffraction imaging to confirm impact-driven recrystallisation. The work appeared in Meteoritics & Planetary Science. ScienceDaily · Space.com
12. Halley's debris crosses Argentine skies again
The Orionids, the meteor shower produced by fragments Comet Halley left along its orbit, will peak on the night of October 21–22 and will be visible from Argentina with the naked eye, no telescope needed. The usual rate is 10 to 20 meteors per hour near the peak, though this year a waxing gibbous Moon will wash out some of them; the advice is to look after midnight and in the pre-dawn hours, away from light pollution. The particles enter the atmosphere at about 66 kilometres per second (238,000 km/h). Halley completes an orbit every 76 years: its last pass was in 1986 and the next will be in 2061. Espacio Tech
Argentina Space 2026
Join Argentina Space 2026 — Argentina driving the New Space Economy, on November 11, 12 and 13 at the Salta Convention Centre, and be part of the founding core of New Space in Argentina.
It is the first major national gathering of the space, technology and science industry, bringing together government bodies, companies, universities, startups and investors from Argentina and around the world. The week just past makes the case fairly plainly for having this conversation here: institutional capital is already structuring sovereign space programs in Latin America, and the country that shows up with industry, talent and clear rules is the one that will capture that investment.
- Join as an exhibitor, sponsor or attendee.
- Commercial and institutional contact: marketing@argentinaspace.com
- More information: https://argentinaspace.com
