A week defined by European money: Open Cosmos closed one of the continent's largest space deals of the year, and Viasat and Space42 formally established a joint venture worth up to one billion dollars to compete in direct-to-device connectivity. Meanwhile, Japan landed its first commercial radar customer for the H3, Isar Aerospace filled its 2028 manifest, and in Argentina both satellite connectivity for schools and the training of new space engineers moved forward.
On the science front, Europe placed two climate satellites in orbit aboard Vega-C, NASA's Roman telescope doubled its operational lifetime thanks to a near-perfect burn, and interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS delivered another surprise from the radio telescopes of the Atacama Desert.
Economy, investment and industry
1. Open Cosmos raises 300 million euros in one of Europe's largest space deals
Satellite manufacturer Open Cosmos, headquartered in the United Kingdom with operations in Spain, announced on 14 September a 300 million euro round (about 346 million dollars) to finance satellite infrastructure. The deal was led by Lightrock, with participation from ETF Partners, Institut Català de Finances, Entrepreneurs First, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Phoenix Court, Convex Group, Claret Capital Partners and two major international pension funds. The capital will go toward increasing satellite production and expanding AI-driven data services, including disaster monitoring. The company explicitly prioritised European investors, in line with the sector's political climate: the round is part of a funding wave through which Europe is seeking to reduce its dependence on dominant US operators. Read the story and CNBC's context analysis.
2. Viasat and Space42 formally establish Equatys: up to one billion dollars for a 2,800-satellite constellation
On 15 September, Space42 (United Arab Emirates) and Viasat signed the binding agreement formally establishing Equatys, a joint venture for shared satellite and ground infrastructure. The partners committed up to one billion dollars in combined initial equity — 400 million each upon formation, plus an additional 200 million expected from Space42 in a future round. The goal is to deploy a low Earth orbit mega-constellation of up to 2,800 satellites delivering direct-to-device (D2D) connectivity and advanced mobile satellite services across global markets. Equatys thus enters a board where SpaceX's planned 15,000-satellite D2D system and Amazon's proposed network of roughly 5,100 satellites are already in play. Read the story.
3. Japan's H3 rocket lands its first commercial radar customer: iQPS books three satellites
Japanese radar-imaging startup iQPS signed a rideshare launch services agreement with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on 14 September to place three QPS-SAR satellites in orbit aboard the H3 rocket. It is the first commercial synthetic aperture radar constellation customer for the Japanese launcher, and the deal is backed by the Japanese government's Space Strategy Fund. iQPS is building toward a 36-satellite constellation capable of revisiting any point on Earth roughly every 10 minutes, a threshold that makes near-real-time monitoring of disaster zones, infrastructure, shipping and agriculture commercially viable. Read the story.
4. SEOPS books five dedicated launches on Isar Aerospace's Spectrum
Ten days after Isar Aerospace became the first European launch startup to reach orbit — achieved on 5 September, on the second flight of the Spectrum rocket — the German company announced on 15 September a multiple launch service agreement with US-based SEOPS covering five additional dedicated launches, to be flown between 2028 and 2030 from Andøya Space (Norway) and Spaceport Nova Scotia (Canada). The contract leaves Isar's 2028 manifest close to full and extends SEOPS' Waymaker program to European rideshares. It is concrete evidence that flight success translates quickly into commercial demand. Read the story.
5. SpaceX launches its 700th Falcon rocket and completes SES's O3b mPOWER constellation
On 13 September, SpaceX launched from Cape Canaveral the 700th Falcon rocket in company history, on a mission that carried the final three O3b mPOWER satellites for Luxembourg-based operator SES to medium Earth orbit. With this flight, SES completes the deployment of a high-throughput constellation built for managed broadband services to governments, cruise lines, aviation and cellular networks in regions fibre does not reach — a segment in which Latin America is one of the reference markets. The 700-Falcon milestone also illustrates the extent to which launch cadence has ceased to be the industry's bottleneck. Read the story.
6. Argentina: 6,000 Starlink terminals for rural schools at around 22 million dollars
A sector review published on 13 September details the ongoing deployment of 6,000 Starlink satellite terminals across Argentine educational institutions, primarily rural schools and isolated communities, with equipment and connectivity service at a total cost of close to 22 million dollars. The piece situates that investment within a broader technological reactivation: the start-up of the RA-10 multipurpose nuclear reactor, expected to begin before the end of 2026 and be completed in the first months of 2027, and the continuity of the SARE satellite program, with four observation satellites at the basic engineering stage. It is a reminder that, within Argentina's space economy, satellite connectivity is today the application with the most immediate social impact. Read the story.
7. CONAE opens registration for CANSAT Universitario 2026-2027
Argentina's National Commission on Space Activities (CONAE) published the terms and conditions for CANSAT Universitario 2026-2027 on 10 September and opened registration, which will remain available until 9 October 2026 for undergraduate students from public and private universities across the country. The challenge consists of designing, building and flight-testing a can-sized device that performs satellite functions, and represents the most technically demanding tier of the CANSAT Argentina program. Beyond the competition itself, it is one of the few structured pathways to hands-on space engineering training available to Argentine university students today, and feeds directly into the talent pipeline the local industry needs. Read the story.
Science, exploration and missions
8. Vega-C places Sentinel-3C and FLEX, two European climate satellites, in orbit
On 15 September at 01:21 UTC, a Vega-C rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou carrying two European Space Agency Earth observation satellites. It was the second flight of the year managed entirely by Avio without Arianespace as intermediary, a structural change in how the European launcher is commercialised. Sentinel-3C, weighing 1.15 tonnes, continues the Copernicus series and measures sea-surface temperature, ocean colour, sea level and sea-ice characteristics. FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer), ESA's eighth Earth Explorer mission, is the first designed to measure from space the faint fluorescence plants emit during photosynthesis: because that signal varies with crop health and environmental stress, it will allow global photosynthetic activity to be assessed, with direct applications for agriculture. Both satellites separated correctly and are healthy in orbit. Read the story.
9. NASA's Roman telescope goes from 10 to 22 years of lifetime thanks to a near-perfect burn
NASA reported on 14 September that the first mid-course correction of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope went far better than expected: the burn placed the observatory on course for the L2 Lagrange point with 99% accuracy and consumed just 18 kilograms of fuel, less than 10% of the 200 kilograms budgeted for the manoeuvre. Combined with the fact that the telescope reached launch considerably lighter than its design mass — 8,056 kg versus 9,800 kg, allowing extra propellant to be loaded — Roman moves from a 10-year fuel budget to having propellant for at least 22 years of science operations. In practice, this doubles the scientific return of a mission central to the study of dark energy, exoplanets and wide-field infrared surveys. Read the story.
10. Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS reveals unprecedented chemistry, measured from Atacama
A study published on 9 September in The Astrophysical Journal Letters found that 3I/ATLAS — the third confirmed interstellar visitor to the Solar System — is outgassing anomalous quantities of methanol. The observations, made with the Atacama Compact Array of the ALMA radio telescope in northern Chile, measured methanol-to-hydrogen-cyanide ratios of roughly 70 and 120 on two separate dates, far above any comet originating in our own system. The data come from late 2025, when the object was near perihelion and at its peak chemical activity, and indicate that 3I/ATLAS formed under conditions very different from those of local comets. The finding again highlights the value of the astronomical infrastructure installed in Latin America: without ALMA, this chemical fingerprint from another planetary system could not have been measured. Read the story.
11. James Webb rules out moons around an exoplanet, and that is good news
Work released on 13 September reported that the James Webb Space Telescope analysed the exoplanet LP 890-9 c, which orbits an ultracool red dwarf about 105 light-years from Earth, and ruled out with 95% confidence the presence of moons larger than 0.1 Earth radii. The result is negative but methodologically valuable: it demonstrates that JWST already has the sensitivity needed to place quantitative limits on the existence of exomoons, a goal that was out of reach until recently. Constraining the inventory of natural satellites around potentially habitable planets is an indispensable prior step to correctly interpreting their atmospheres. Read the story.
12. Active supermassive black holes may fuel star formation, not only shut it down
A study published on 14 September covering nine nearby active galaxies challenges one of the most established ideas in extragalactic astrophysics: that growing supermassive black holes suppress star formation in their host galaxies. Using spatially resolved spectroscopy, the authors identified star-forming rings and arcs between 0.8 and 6 kiloparsecs from the galactic centres, alongside ionising radiation cones and fast shocks frequently oriented perpendicular to those cones. The geometry suggests black hole activity can compress gas and trigger stellar birth rather than prevent it, qualifying the feedback models used to explain galaxy evolution. Read the story.
Argentina Space 2026
Argentina Space 2026 — Argentina driving the New Space Economy will take place on 11, 12 and 13 November 2026 at the Salta Convention Centre. It is the first major national gathering of the space, technology and science industry, bringing together government agencies, companies, universities, startups and investors from Argentina and around the world.
If your organisation would like to take part as an exhibitor, sponsor or attendee, write to us at marketing@argentinaspace.com.
Join Argentina Space 2026 on 11, 12 and 13 November at the Salta Convention Centre, and be part of the founding core of New Space in Argentina. More information: https://argentinaspace.com
