The week closed with two strong signals: private capital concentrated once again on critical infrastructure — navigation, satellite buses and direct-to-device connectivity — while the science agenda found an unexpected protagonist in the southern hemisphere. As the FCC cleared one of the largest deals in the sector's history and Europe expanded its sovereign navigation constellation, the Rubin Observatory in Chile announced what could be the solar system's sixth dwarf planet. Twelve stories to understand where the space economy is heading and what science is uncovering.
Economy, investment and industry
1. SpaceX and Tesla form independent committees to study a merger
Elon Musk disclosed during SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call that both companies have formed special committees of independent directors to examine a possible combination, at shareholders' request. Musk said he is recusing himself from the talks as a conflicted party, that he believes the deal "has merit" but that nobody should treat it as a done thing: no terms have been agreed and any agreement would require shareholder approval at both companies. In Tesla's case, he noted it would need the backing of 50% of all outstanding shares — not just of votes cast — which he called "quite a high hurdle." The possibility alone is moving markets: days later Barclays upgraded Tesla, citing precisely the merger potential. If completed, it would be the largest vertical integration ever attempted between an automaker and a space company. Read on NBC News
2. FCC approves Amazon Leo's $11.5 billion acquisition of Globalstar
On October 27 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission authorized the acquisition of Globalstar by Amazon Leo — Amazon's satellite business, formerly known as Kuiper — for $11.5 billion, and denied a petition from Yippy, a former Globalstar partner that had tried to block the deal. With the green light, Amazon takes over Globalstar's MSS spectrum licenses, its constellation of roughly two dozen low Earth orbit satellites dedicated to direct-to-device connectivity, its more than 780,000 connected devices across over 120 countries and, above all, its standing agreement with Apple. The FCC also cleared Amazon Leo to use, once the transaction closes, the authorization for Globalstar's C-3 platform (48 operational satellites plus six spares). Separately, the regulator is still reviewing an Amazon Leo application for a direct-to-device system of more than 5,100 satellites, with the next-generation platform due to launch in 2028. The move reshapes the direct-to-device board overnight, where Starlink, AST SpaceMobile and now an Amazon with spectrum of its own are competing. Read on Light Reading
3. Xona raises $250 million to challenge GPS from low Earth orbit
U.S. startup Xona Space Systems announced a $250 million Series D on October 22, led by Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures and an early SpaceX investor, at a $2.45 billion valuation. The round brings the company's total to more than $570 million since it was founded in 2019. The money goes to scaling Pulsar, a commercial positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) constellation designed as a high-performance alternative to government GPS: Xona says its signals are roughly 100 times more powerful than legacy GPS, with centimeter-level precision, jamming resistance and indoor reception. The long-term plan calls for some 258 satellites; six Pulsar spacecraft are already in orbit after SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 mission, commercial timing service begins in 2027, and the production target is 50 satellites per year by the end of that same year. In August, Xona became the first commercial GPS constellation authorized by the FCC to broadcast in L-band. Read on Payload Space
4. Apex in talks for $500 million at a $4 billion valuation
Los Angeles-based satellite bus manufacturer Apex is in talks to raise around $500 million at a valuation close to $4 billion, Bloomberg reported on October 22, with Washington Harbour Partners expected to lead the round. The figure would nearly double the valuation the company held in June. Apex produces standardized satellite platforms — its bet is to treat the bus as a catalog product rather than a bespoke development — for commercial and defense customers, a segment that has become a bottleneck as constellations multiply. The case illustrates the dominant investment thesis of 2026: capital rewards suppliers of repeatable infrastructure ahead of service operators. Read on Bloomberg
5. ESA orders four more Galileo Second Generation satellites from Airbus and Thales
The European Space Agency announced on October 27 the purchase of four additional Galileo Second Generation (G2) satellites, two from Thales Alenia Space in Italy and two from Airbus Defence and Space in Germany. The contracts were signed on October 23 in Rome and on October 26 in Ottobrunn. With this expansion the G2 fleet grows from 12 to 16 satellites: each prime contractor already had six assigned under 2021 contracts. The four new units will be delivered in 2031 and launched immediately afterwards; integration and flight testing of the first G2 spacecraft are planned for 2027, and the first launch of the new generation for 2028. The contract value was not disclosed. The decision reinforces Europe's bet on autonomy in satellite navigation, at a moment when the continent is debating how to finance its space sovereignty. Read on ESA
6. NASA contracts an evaluation of Planet's Tanager hyperspectral data
Planet announced on October 21 that its federal subsidiary received a task order from NASA, under the Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition program, to evaluate hyperspectral data from its Tanager mission. The assignment covers observations over more than 250,000 square kilometers, combining recent archive and new collections. The Tanager sensor captures some 426 spectral bands spaced roughly five nanometers apart, across visible and infrared wavelengths, at 30 meters per pixel. NASA will produce an evaluation report that could open broad access to the data for the research community, with applications in atmospheric research, biodiversity, hydrology, geology and the monitoring of fires and floods. It is an example of the model the agency has been consolidating: instead of building the instrument, buy the data from a private operator. Read on New Space Economy
7. Argentina: SABIA-Mar passes thermal vacuum testing and the Air Force prepares an experimental launch
Two domestic developments in the same week. On October 21 it was confirmed that the SABIA-Mar satellite, developed by CONAE together with INVAP, had completed thermal vacuum testing in Bariloche and that its cameras had been verified. The mission is dedicated to the study of water color — ocean productivity, coastlines and river basins — and its launch is planned for the second quarter of 2027. A day later it emerged that the Argentine Air Force is planning an experimental launch in November from CELPA II Atlántico, in Mar Chiquita, Buenos Aires province, following on from the MET 1-SO "Escorpio" and MET 2-SO "Crux" flights carried out in 2025. Together, the two items show the two tracks along which Argentine space activity is advancing today: the consolidated satellite capability of CONAE and INVAP, and an independent access to space still at an experimental stage. Read on Espacio Tech
Science, exploration and missions
8. From Chile, the Rubin Observatory reveals its first dwarf planet candidate
On October 27 the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located on Cerro Pachón in Chile, announced the discovery of 2026 ED138, a trans-Neptunian object that could become the solar system's sixth recognized dwarf planet, alongside Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake. Preliminary estimates put it between 600 and 1,500 kilometers across and currently about 46 astronomical units from the Sun — Pluto orbits at an average of 40 — on an orbit tilted nearly 25 degrees from the plane of the solar system, which classifies it as a "hot classical" trans-Neptunian object, once disturbed by Neptune's gravity. The discovery came on the night of October 13, when Matthew Holman (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian) ran Rubin data through a search code developed with Kevin Napier, capable of linking billions of moving-object detections. Mario Jurić (University of Washington) found 20 further observations in the catalogs: in total Rubin recorded it 30 times over 20 nights between March 4 and July 11, 2026, and the Dark Energy Camera archive allowed its orbit to be reconstructed ten years back. Infrared observations are still needed for confirmation. The regional angle is strong: it is the first major find of its kind from the most powerful observatory of its type in the world, installed on Latin American soil. Read on SLAC
9. NASA accelerates Artemis: Moon landing in 2028 and a crewed low Earth orbit flight in 2027
On October 23, at a press conference at Kennedy Space Center, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons presented the revised plan to return to the Moon. The stated goal is to put American astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028. Under that scheme, Artemis III will fly in 2027 with a crew of four to low Earth orbit to test the systems needed for future landings, and Artemis IV becomes the program's first mission to actually descend to the lunar surface. NASA also announced measures to accelerate lander development alongside its industry partners. It is a significant reorganization of the program's architecture, redefining which mission does what and shifting the center of gravity towards early systems demonstration. Read on NASA
10. Webb links interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS to Kuiper Belt objects
A study led by Silvia Protopapa (Southwest Research Institute) and published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters — reported on October 26 — analyzed the third known interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, with the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec spectrograph in PRISM mode, across three campaigns: August and December 2025 and April 2026. The result is water ice unlike the usual kind: grains of about one micron or smaller mixed with rocky dust, with a very strong water band at 3.0 microns and the 1.5- and 2.0-micron bands very weak or absent. That pattern does not match typical solar system comets, but rather distant Kuiper Belt objects. The third observation also hints at crystalline water ice and a second population of larger, more ice-rich grains. The conclusion is striking: the properties of icy grains may follow universal physics of protoplanetary disks rather than the particular conditions of each star system. Read on Tech Times
11. Three supermassive black holes in a single galaxy from the early universe
A team led by Hannah Übler, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, detected three actively feeding supermassive black holes in galaxy J0148-4214, observed with the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec integral field spectroscopy. The galaxy sits at redshift z = 5.02: its light traveled some 12.5 billion years, so we see it as it was barely 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Two of the black holes are near the center, separated by about 620 light-years in projection, and the third lies some 5,500 light-years out. Their masses are roughly 80 million, 600,000 and 2 million solar masses, and the smallest is feeding faster than standard models allow. Übler describes it as "the first evidence of three active black holes in a single galaxy in the distant Universe." The work was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and feeds into the open debate over how the giant black holes of the early cosmos formed so quickly. Read on ScienceDaily
12. Sunrise III uncovers a hidden magnetic web in the "quiet" Sun
An international team led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has shown that even the Sun's quiet regions — which cover most of its surface — conceal magnetic structures of enormous complexity. The observations come from Sunrise III, a one-meter telescope carried by a stratospheric balloon to about 35 kilometers altitude in 2024, with the infrared SCIP instrument as its centerpiece. The data reveal fine thread-like features within the magnetic canopy of the chromosphere, which according to simulations form when motions on the solar surface twist the field lines. The team also mapped for the first time how the magnetic fields of spicules — the narrow jets at the solar limb — change with height. The finding, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, offers clues to how energy rises from the surface and helps heat the solar atmosphere, an open problem with direct implications for space weather. Read on ScienceDaily
Argentina Space 2026
Join Argentina Space 2026 — Argentina driving the New Space Economy, on November 11, 12 and 13 at the Salta Convention Center, 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. You can join as an exhibitor, sponsor or attendee.
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