A week of records. Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed operational satellites, space infrastructure investment posted its best quarter in more than a year, and Europe took two concrete steps toward autonomy: a station of its own and sovereign infrastructure for its Earth observation data. Closer to home, six Argentine-built satellites fly today aboard a Falcon 9.
Economy, investment and industry
1. Space infrastructure investment hits its best quarter in over a year
Space Capital reported that global investment in space infrastructure — the hardware and software used to build, launch and operate assets in orbit — reached US$4.4 billion in the quarter ended in late September, a five-quarter high and a 12% quarter-on-quarter increase. The firm attributes much of the jump to record activity in China's commercial launch industry, which accounted for several of the period's largest rounds, in a year that has already been exceptional for U.S. satellite manufacturing. The figure matters as a thermometer: infrastructure is the most capital-intensive segment of the space economy and the one that sets the industry's capacity for the next five years.
Source: SpaceNews
2. Redwire joins the U.S. Space Force's NITE-STAR vehicle, worth up to US$980 million
The U.S. Space Force added Redwire (NYSE: RDW) as one of 15 industry partners on the NITE-STAR program (National Space Test and Training Complex Innovative Technology and Engineering – Space Test and Range), a contract vehicle worth more than US$980 million with ordering phases running up to 10 years. The fine print matters for anyone watching the stock: the figure is the ceiling of the overall vehicle and does not guarantee revenue; what it unlocks is the ability to bid on specific task orders covering design, development, integration, testing and sustainment of space-based and ground-based hardware. Redwire brings solar arrays and structures, sensors and avionics, radio frequency payloads, small satellites and very low Earth orbit platforms.
Source: The Defense Post
3. Redwire and Sophia Space join the race for orbital data centers
A day after that award, Redwire and Sophia Space signed a memorandum of understanding to develop and deploy scalable computing infrastructure in orbit. The bet combines Sophia's modular TILE architecture — which integrates high-performance computing, solar power and passive radiative thermal management into a single module designed for artificial intelligence inference and data processing — with Redwire's experience in space systems and power. The agreement covers near-term demonstration missions and longer-term orbital data center designs, with potential commercial and government customers including DARPA, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Space Development Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. The problem they say they want to solve is the sector's real bottleneck: moving from isolated demonstrations to repeatable, scalable infrastructure.
Source: PR Newswire
4. ESA picks Airbus and OHB to study a European space station
On 29 September the European Space Agency awarded study contracts to two consortia led by Airbus and OHB to assess the feasibility of a wholly European space station once the International Space Station retires. ESA is weighing three scenarios for its presence in low Earth orbit: relying primarily on externally provided commercial infrastructure, making a limited European contribution to a commercial station program, or leading a European initiative open to international and commercial partners. The Airbus and OHB studies target the third. Development spending on the initial system would be capped at €1 billion per three-year funding period, with development limited to two such periods, and the studies must be completed by June 2027. The agency explicitly asked the consortia to draw on existing European heritage: the ISS Columbus module and the European Service Module Airbus builds for NASA's Orion spacecraft. Six additional industrial and institutional partners, not yet named, will also take part.
Source: European Spaceflight
5. Europe puts sovereign infrastructure behind its Earth observation data
ESA awarded OVHcloud and CGI a multi-million-euro, 30-month contract to design and operate Digital EO, the new compute, storage and networking backbone for its Earth observation activities, including those supporting the European Union's Copernicus program and the Destination Earth initiative. OVHcloud supplies the infrastructure while CGI acts as system architect and integrator. The platform will be decentralized, with sites in France, Germany and Italy and support operations based in Poland, and the central requirement is sovereignty: processing and storage must stay within European jurisdiction and under European operational control. The underlying driver is scale — ESA projects the volume of this data will exceed 500 petabytes by 2035.
Source: Intelligent CIO
6. Argentina puts six satellites in orbit on SpaceX's Transporter-18 mission
Today, Thursday 1 October, at 15:15 Argentine time, the Transporter-18 rideshare mission lifts off on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California carrying six Argentine satellites. Four are new Earth observation satellites from Satellogic, the company founded by Argentine entrepreneur Emiliano Kargieman, which has held a multi-launch agreement with SpaceX since 2022. The other two are institutional milestones: USAT-1, a 3U CubeSat measuring 10 × 10 × 34 cm and weighing about 3 kg, is the first Argentine CubeSat designed and built entirely by a university — the Engineering Faculty of the National University of La Plata, through its Aerospace Technology Center and the SENyT group — and its mission is to demonstrate Earth observation and atmospheric measurement techniques using GNSS signals. The NanoSat Technology Evaluator (ETNS) is the first nanosatellite built by the Argentine Army, developed with the defense research institute CITEDEF: it is not operational but a demonstrator to validate design, integration, operation and the onboard link and reconnaissance systems. Taken together, the flight shows a national ecosystem that is widening: a private company, a public university and the defense sector on the same mission.
Source: Espacio Tech
7. Avio breaks ground on its first U.S. solid rocket motor plant
On 29 September Avio USA, the subsidiary of Italy's Avio group, broke ground on a 900,000-square-foot plant in Hurt, Virginia, inside the Southern Virginia Multimodal Park. It is the company's first manufacturing facility in the United States, represents an investment on the order of US$500 million and is expected to create roughly 1,500 technical jobs. The plant should be operational in early 2029 and produce thousands of solid rocket motors a year to meet demand from the Pentagon and contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. It is a clear illustration of how a shortage of solid propulsion became an industrial bottleneck with public policy consequences on both sides of the Atlantic.
Source: SpaceNews
Science, exploration and missions
8. Starship reaches orbit for the first time and deploys 26 Starlink V3 satellites
On Monday 28 September at 8:46 a.m. EDT, Starship lifted off from Starbase, Texas, atop a Super Heavy V3 booster and became, on its 14th flight, the first Starship to enter low Earth orbit and the first to deploy operational satellites. The vehicle settled at roughly 275 km altitude and released 26 Starlink V3 satellites from its dispenser; SpaceX later confirmed contact with all 26. The original flight plan called for about six orbits and a splashdown west of Chile, but the mission was shortened: after two orbits, the ship performed its deorbit burn at the 2 h 12 min mark using one of its Raptor 3 engines and splashed down in the North Pacific, with a nominal bellyflop, flip and landing burn. The technical leap has immediate commercial consequences: SpaceX has already signaled it will phase out the Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft as Starship enters service, forcing the entire launch supply chain and ISS operators to rewrite their plans.
Source: Space.com
9. Crew-13 cleared to fly to the International Space Station
On 30 September, at the close of the flight readiness review, NASA and SpaceX declared "go" for the launch of the Crew-13 mission, scheduled for today, 1 October, at 11:10 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Flying aboard a Dragon on a Falcon 9 are NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. Docking is expected about 8 hours after liftoff, for a six-month stay in orbit.
Source: NASA
10. From Chile, the Vera Rubin Observatory finds one of the faintest galaxies ever seen
This is the first major discovery from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón, Chile, and it carries direct regional significance: the 8.4-meter Simonyi telescope, equipped with the largest digital camera ever built, detected Aquarius IV, the first ultra-faint Milky Way satellite galaxy identified with Rubin data. It sits roughly 359,000 light-years from the galactic center, its stars are around 13 billion years old — it formed near the dawn of the universe — and its mass amounts to just about 1,500 solar masses, against the Milky Way's roughly 1.5 trillion. These galaxies are essentially clumps of dark matter: between 99% and 99.9% of their mass is dark and only 0.1% to 1% is stars. The object turned up while mining Early Data Preview 2, which covered just 7% of the sky between April 2025 and January 2026, at 8.0 sigma significance. Rubin only began its ten-year LSST survey in July 2026, imaging the entire southern sky every three nights: this preview suggests the census of Milky Way satellites is about to multiply, and that much of that catalog will be written from South America.
Source: Live Science
11. NASA names the first three science investigations for its Moon base
NASA selected three new science investigations and their payload suites to prepare for the first lunar outpost, chosen through the PRISM program and delivered to the surface by the commercial CLPS initiative. LEMS-SP (Lunar Environment Monitoring Station – South Pole) will track micrometeoroid impacts, monitor volatiles drifting through the Moon's thin exosphere and use a short-period seismometer to detect seismic activity. GIMLI (Geophysical Investigation for Mapping Lunar Interior) will scan beneath the surface to determine whether a lunar pit connects to a large void: if confirmed, that could reshape base planning by identifying natural shelters for long-term habitation. DISCO (Distribution of Ice and Surface Characteristics Observatory) will deliver the first direct measurements of ice inside lunar micro-cold traps, tiny pockets where temperatures plunge low enough to preserve frozen water. Together the package targets exactly what determines whether a base is viable: resources, shelter and environmental hazards.
Source: NASA
12. The JUICE probe uses Earth to pick up speed toward Jupiter
The European Space Agency's JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) mission made another flyby of our planet on 29 September, passing just 8,640 km above Earth's surface and gaining roughly 3,500 m/s in velocity from the gravity assist. The maneuver is part of the complex flyby sequence the spacecraft uses to build up the energy it needs to reach the Jupiter system, where it will study Ganymede, Callisto and Europa — the icy moons thought to harbor subsurface oceans — in detail. Each of these steps saves propellant that would otherwise make the mission impossible with available launch vehicles.
Source: Espacio Tech
Argentina Space 2026
Argentina Space 2026 — Argentina driving the New Space Economy is the country's 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.
Join Argentina Space 2026 on 11, 12 and 13 November at the Salta Convention Center, and be part of the founding core of New Space in Argentina. More information: https://argentinaspace.com
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