An intense week in which money and science pushed in the same direction: NASA opened a lunar contract framework worth up to $10 billion, the satellite industry closed one of the largest private rounds of the year, and quarterly results confirmed that New Space is now moving numbers worthy of a mature sector. In parallel, the James Webb Space Telescope revealed a planet hidden in archived data, the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile found two hidden companions of the Milky Way, and two NASA probes executed an unprecedented maneuver on their way to Mars. And the whole region is watching Argentina: this week the country hosts two of the most relevant space gatherings on the Latin American calendar.
Economy, investment and industry
1. NASA opens a lunar contract framework worth up to $10 billion
On Saturday, November 7, at Kennedy Space Center, NASA announced the most ambitious package of awards in its lunar campaign. The centerpiece is CLPS 2, the second generation of its commercial lunar payload services program, with eight companies selected — Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies — and a combined maximum value of $10 billion over ten years. The fine print matters: this is an IDIQ contract ceiling, not money already awarded. In the same batch, the agency raised the original CLPS ceiling from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion, issued six VADR task orders worth roughly $1.3 billion (with Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space among the recipients), and gave the green light to PROMISE, a nuclear-powered polar rover built by JPL from spare parts of Curiosity and Perseverance, targeting a late 2028 launch and an 18-month mission. Blue Origin won the rover delivery with its Mark 1 lander: a $94 million base contract plus a $140 million option. SpaceX, for its part, will deploy cislunar communications satellites using Starship in 2028. For the supplier ecosystem the message is clear: the Moon base has stopped being a plan and become a supply chain with purchase orders.
2. CesiumAstro raises $730 million and announces a 737-satellite constellation
On November 5, the Austin, Texas company announced a $730 million Series D led by Janus Henderson, at a valuation above $4.5 billion. With this round, CesiumAstro has raised more than $1.2 billion in 2026 alone, one of the highest figures of the year across the entire satellite industry. The capital is earmarked for Synchronicity, a proprietary network of 737 satellites operating in Ku, Ka and V bands with multiple beams, aimed at commercial, government and defense customers: the company will not only build the satellites but operate the network and sell its communications and computing capacity. It is a significant leap for a company that started out supplying electronically steered active phased-array antennas and onboard computers. It has already identified the first eight Element spacecraft — Element-1 has been operating since October 2026 — and secured launches for the next seven. In parallel, it announced a five-year, $500 million expansion of its Austin headquarters, with 270,000 square feet of manufacturing space and more than 1,000 employees in the region by 2030.
3. Rocket Lab: record revenue and first positive operating cash flow, but Neutron slips to 2027
Third-quarter 2026 results, published on November 9, show a company at an inflection point. Revenue reached $267.8 million, up 73% from $155.1 million in the same quarter of 2025, and above the $257.2 million consensus. For the first time in its history, Rocket Lab posted positive GAAP operating cash flow: $7.2 million. GAAP gross margin rose to 33.6%, and backlog jumped 52% sequentially to $3.57 billion, with 117 launch missions committed. Cash stands at $4.45 billion. The counterweight: a GAAP net loss of $79.7 million ($0.12 per share, including a one-time $27.3 million charge from extinguishing a bridge loan) and, above all, the slip of the Neutron rocket's first flight from late 2026 to 2027, caused by a void defect in the carbon composite forward dome of the first-stage propellant tank. Even so, Neutron added $515 million in new contracts during the quarter, equivalent to 16 missions. Fourth-quarter guidance points to revenue between $270 million and $290 million.
4. AST SpaceMobile triples revenue and announces its own 20-ton reusable rocket
On November 9, the direct-to-cell connectivity company reported quarterly revenue of $42.3 million, up from $14.7 million a year earlier, and reaffirmed full-year guidance of $150 million to $200 million. The most disruptive item was the announcement of Blacklift, a proprietary 20-ton reusable rocket to deploy its BlueBird satellites into low Earth orbit starting in late 2028, powered by Miranda and Vira engines and capable of carrying up to five satellites per launch: an unusual piece of vertical integration aimed at removing the access-to-space bottleneck. BlueBirds 11, 12 and 13 are already operating in orbit; 14 through 16 are at Cape Canaveral, and the company projects roughly 45 satellites in orbit by mid-2027. Deals closed during the quarter include $1 billion in non-dilutive funding in Japan (alongside the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and Rakuten), a U.S. Space Force contract worth around $100 million, and commercial authorization in Brazil with 50 MHz of S-band and low-band spectrum. Its ecosystem includes more than 60 mobile network operators representing over 3 billion subscribers.
Source: StockTitan / Business Wire
5. France orders military Earth observation satellites for more than 1.5 billion euros
On November 5, the French Directorate General of Armament notified the contract for the IRIS program (Instruments for Space Intelligence and Imaging), worth more than 1.5 billion euros (around $1.7 billion) according to Airbus. It covers two satellites that will replace the three CSO spacecraft currently in service, operated by the Space Command of the French Air and Space Force. The industrial split leaves Airbus in charge of the platforms, a substantial share of the first satellite's payload and the ground segment, and Thales Alenia Space with the second payload, critical elements of the first satellite and part of the ground segment; subcontractors include Lynred, Pyxalis, Sodern, Safran Reosc and Air Liquide Advanced Technologies. The first IRIS satellite is planned to be operational in 2033, with both in orbit around 2035. The relevant signal for industry: Europe is sustaining sovereign spending on high-resolution Earth observation with decade-long planning horizons, a demand pattern very different from that of commercial constellations.
6. Bariloche gathers the space leaders of Latin America and Europe
On November 12 and 13, INVAP's headquarters in San Carlos de Bariloche will host the Latin American Meeting on Space Development and International Cooperation, organized by Fundación Embajada Abierta and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Participants come from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru, with a keynote by Kai-Uwe Schrogl, special adviser for political affairs at the European Space Agency. Speakers include João Paulo Rodrigues Campos (Visiona Tecnologia Espacial, Brazil), Jonathan Hodge (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile), María Soledad Bastidas Jaramillo (Escuela Militar de Aviación, Colombia), Esteban Carrillo (Costa Rica Aerospace Cluster), Gustavo Medina Tanco (UNAM, Mexico) and Tito Roberto Vilchez Vilchez (Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería, Peru). Argentina will be represented by Conrado Varotto, founder of INVAP and former director of CONAE, and Josefina Pérès, current technical and executive director of CONAE, alongside CNEA, UBA, UNSAM, UNLP and the Gulich Institute. The agenda covers the role of universities, New Space business, and Latin American satellite integration. Together with Argentina Space 2026 in Salta, it makes this the densest space week of the year for the country.
Science, exploration and missions
7. A giant planet emerges from James Webb data that sat in the archive for two years
A team led by Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez and Jason Wang, of Northwestern University, extracted an image of 51 Eridani b, a giant planet that was completely drowned out by its star's glare in James Webb observations taken two years earlier. The star 51 Eridani lies about 97 light-years from Earth. The technique, named FLIP (Physics-based Learning for Imaging Planets), combines a "digital twin" of the telescope with physics models and machine learning to separate the planet's signal from the stellar glare; the authors stress it is not a generative AI model. The underlying challenge is brutal: planets are, in Ferrer-Chavez's words, "a million times fainter than their stars." The work, published on November 4 in Nature under the title "Imaging exoplanets below the telescope stability limit," opens a concrete and high-value possibility: reanalyzing Webb's historical archive in search of worlds that were already photographed without anyone knowing.
8. The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile discovers two hidden companions of the Milky Way
With only 7% of the sky surveyed in its preliminary observations, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory — on Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes — has already found two unknown satellites of the Milky Way. The first, Aquarius IV, is an ultra-faint galaxy in the distant outskirts of our galaxy, about 355,000 light-years from Earth, identified with high confidence by automated search algorithms and led by William Cerny (Yale University). The second, Rubin-GC1, is a star cluster on the opposite side of the galaxy, hidden behind thick layers of cosmic dust, with Aashay Pai (University of Chicago) as first author. About 65 satellite galaxies of the Milky Way are known, and estimates suggest hundreds remain to be discovered. The instrument behind the find is the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope with the largest digital camera ever built, at 3,200 megapixels, which in June began the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a ten-year survey of the southern sky. A reminder that the world-class astronomical infrastructure installed in Latin America is today a protagonist, not a spectator, in major discoveries.
Source: ScienceDaily / Yale University
9. The twin ESCAPADE probes perform a NASA first on their way to Mars
On November 7 and 9, the two spacecraft of the ESCAPADE mission executed a powered Earth flyby: an engine burn performed very close to the planet to take advantage of its gravity and gain momentum. "This is the first time NASA has used a powered Earth flyby to propel a spacecraft toward Mars," said NASA's Asal Naseri; principal investigator Rob Lillis (University of California, Berkeley) was blunter: "No NASA mission has ever done this before." Both burns went perfectly. The probes launched in November 2025 on the second flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket and spent the past year in a kidney-bean-shaped loitering orbit, designed to bring them back to Earth's vicinity precisely in this window. They will arrive at Mars in September 2027. Each spacecraft is roughly the size of two refrigerators and carries three science instruments and a couple of cameras to study the Martian magnetic field, both global and crustal. Along the way, they have already measured Earth's magnetotail at a distance of 1.91 million kilometers.
10. Hera gets its first good look at the asteroid NASA struck in 2022
On November 5, the European Space Agency released the first close-up image of the Didymos binary system captured by the Hera probe. Didymos dominates the frame — about 780 meters across — with only a sliver of its moonlet Dimorphos, roughly 160 meters wide, visible; the two are about one kilometer apart. It is also the opposite face from the one DART's camera showed shortly before impact. Mission scientists are already identifying new boulders, craters and groove and ridge patterns, and confirm that the equatorial ridge is still present. The background is well known: on September 26, 2022, NASA's DART spacecraft crashed into Dimorphos and shortened its orbit by about 33 minutes — from the original 11 hours and 55 minutes — slowing it by some 2.7 millimeters per second. Hera's job is now the scientific counterpart of that experiment: mapping precisely what the impact did to the asteroid, the missing data needed to turn planetary defense into a calibrated, repeatable technique.
11. SpaceX will attempt to catch both Starship stages for the first time
SpaceX announced on November 7 that it is targeting the launch of Starship Flight 15 on Friday, November 13, with a 75-minute window opening at 5:45 PM Eastern, subject to regulatory approval. The novelty is substantial: it will be the first attempt to recover both stages of the vehicle. The company has already caught the Super Heavy booster with the tower's arms on three occasions, but has never attempted to catch the upper stage, which returns higher and faster and poses a considerably harder reentry and precision problem. The flight profile calls for about 14 orbits and more than 22 hours of duration before deorbiting, with the deployment of 26 Starlink V3 satellites among the primary objectives; the Ship catch would come roughly a day after liftoff, and only if conditions are optimal. On Flight 14, the vehicle's first orbital flight, the upper stage was supposed to remain in orbit for about ten hours, and the trip was cut short to around two. If the attempt succeeds, full reusability — the economic premise underpinning Starship's entire cost model — stops being a projection.
Argentina Space 2026: it is happening now
This week, Salta becomes the capital of Argentina's new space economy. Argentina Space 2026 — Argentina driving the New Space Economy takes place on November 11, 12 and 13 at the Salta Convention Center: the first major national gathering of the space, technology and science industries, bringing together agencies, companies, universities, startups and investors from Argentina and around the world.
If this week's roundup makes one thing clear, it is that the decisions shaping the space map of the next decade are being made right now, and that the region has what it takes to take part. Join Argentina Space 2026, on November 11, 12 and 13 at the Salta Convention Center, and be part of the founding core of New Space in Argentina. More information: https://argentinaspace.com
You can take part as an exhibitor, sponsor or attendee. For commercial and accreditation inquiries, write to us at marketing@argentinaspace.com.
