Space economy, defense, and the money behind them. Writing Space Worthy, a weekly brief. Ex @boeing @google @openstreetmap. Proudly 🇪🇺
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European launchers: the full series in one place.
Opener: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
1 Isar Aerospace: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
2 PLD Space: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
3 MaiaSpace: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
4 Rocket Factory Augsburg: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
5 Ariane 6: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
6 Avio and Vega C: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
7 HyImpulse: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
8 Orbex and Omnidea: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
9 Latitude and Sirius: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
10 Skyrora: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
11 Wrap-up: teapawt.net/simonecortesi/status/2…
Only Isar has reached orbit so far. PLD Space and MaiaSpace are next, both aiming for 2027.
European launchers, part 4: Rocket Factory Augsburg.
Rocket Factory Augsburg, or RFA, was founded in 2018 in Augsburg, Germany. Its majority owner is OHB, the satellite maker from Bremen. RFA One is a three-stage rocket, about 30 metres tall, with nine Helix engines on the first stage. The current version is built for up to 500 kg to sun-synchronous orbit. It will launch from SaxaVord in Shetland, which would be the first vertical orbital launch from the United Kingdom.
RFA One has not flown. In August 2024 a first stage was destroyed in a ground test at SaxaVord. A new rocket stood on the pad in July 2026, but after a week of tests RFA found an issue and took it down. The August launch window was cancelled. There is still no new date.
The money keeps coming. In August the European Space Agency signed a €186.9 million contract that requires an orbital launch before 2028. In September it added €2.7 million for test stands at SaxaVord. On 5 October Alexander Dahm, from Hensoldt and Airbus, became CEO.
RFA has the funding and a spaceport, but its first flight has no date after two setbacks on the pad. Isar is already in orbit and PLD targets the first half of 2027, so RFA is behind both.
SpaceX closed at $134.72 on Friday. The IPO price in June was $135, so the stock now sits just below what new investors paid.
On October 6 it closed at $171.92 and the company was worth more than $2.3 trillion. Now it is about $1.8 trillion. That is over $500 billion lost in less than a month.
The drop lines up with the lockup. On October 21 the stock jumped about 8% after third-quarter results. The next day 1.3 billion shares became free to sell and it fell 9%. Friday's 6% fall came with the whole tech sector down.
The next release is December 8: up to 797.6 million more shares.
My read: early holders selling are setting the price right now, and that pressure has one more big round to go in December.
Hubble has no engine. Since its last reboost in 2002 it has dropped from 583 km to about 470 km.
NASA's new request for information, published October 29, puts numbers on the clock: a 10% chance of reentry by September 2032 and 50% by December 2033. NASA wants a mission by 2032 that boosts it to at least 600 km, services it, or brings it down in a controlled way. The company would supply the rocket, the servicing spacecraft and the operations. NASA has no money set aside yet. Answers are due November 30.
This was tried in 2022. Jared Isaacman offered a mostly privately funded Dragon mission, eight teams answered a similar NASA request, and in 2024 NASA said no. Now Isaacman runs NASA, and crewed Dragon is set to retire by 2030, so this round is about robotic servicers. NASA already gave Katalyst $30 million and nine months to rescue the smaller Swift telescope. It launched on time and got within about 10 km.
Hubble has no replacement for its visible and ultraviolet work before the 2040s. A robotic reboost is the cheapest way to keep it, and NASA should pay for one.
Shaun Maguire of Sequoia posted his bottom-up SpaceX model last night. Revenue goes from $51.5 billion in 2026 to $274 billion in 2027 and $731 billion in 2028.
Most of that growth comes from data centers on the ground. Terrestrial compute is $569 billion of the 2028 total, about 78%. Orbital compute is $31 billion.
The model takes SpaceX from 1.7 gigawatts of compute today to 21 gigawatts by the end of 2028, earning $40 billion per gigawatt per year. It also needs $290 billion of capital spending in 2027, and cash falls by $123 billion that year.
Sequoia is a major SpaceX shareholder, and he says so. The bull case for SpaceX right now is a bet on AI data centers on Earth.
Google's Project Suncatcher satellite just ran its first AI prompt in orbit.
The prototype, built with Planet, launched October 1 on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare. It carries four Google TPUs (tensor processing units, its AI chips) and makes up to 1 kilowatt of power.
After about three weeks of commissioning, engineers sent a prompt to a Gemma model and got a haiku back over Svalbard. Each TPU can only run for about 15 to 20 minutes at a time because of power and heat. Next come radiation and thermal tests, then two linked satellites in 2027.
A data center chip works in orbit. Orbital compute at useful scale is still years away.
India launched NVS-03 tonight on its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-F18). It is the newest satellite for NavIC, India's own navigation system.
NavIC needs four working satellites to give a position on its own. It has three. So right now it only provides timing.
The previous satellite, NVS-02, reached its transfer orbit in January 2025 and then got stuck. The signal to open a valve on its orbit-raising engine never arrived, most likely because of loose connector contacts.
That makes the next few days the real test. NVS-03 must fire its engine and climb from a 170 by 37,023 km orbit to its final position. If that works, India gets standalone positioning back. If it fails, NavIC stays a timing service until NVS-04 flies.
Canada's MDA Space will build the antennas for the first 66 satellites of IRIS², the EU's secure satellite network.
The deal is with Thales Alenia Space, which builds the payloads. Airbus builds the satellite bodies. MDA's first authorization to proceed is worth more than $100 million, and the full contract is still being negotiated. The antennas will be made in Montréal. The first satellites launch in 2029.
IRIS² is sold as Europe's sovereign network. For its first 66 satellites, a core piece will come from Canada. Canada is a close ally, so the risk is small, but Europe did not supply this part itself.
Argotec, the Turin company that built LICIACube for NASA's DART mission and ArgoMoon for Artemis I, has taken outside money for the first time since it was founded in 2008. NUO Space put in $56 million. NUO was the first investor in Bending Spoons.
Argotec says it can build 52 small satellites a year and wants to reach 80. Revenue was $39 million in 2024 and $63 million in 2025. CEO David Avino expects more than $78 million this year and over $111 million in 2027, and says the company has always made a profit.
He is already working on a second round of more than $167 million, to close by the first quarter of 2027.
Argotec grew for 18 years on its own profits and is now raising to build faster. Few European space companies can say that.
In April, Amazon told investors that Leo would start commercial service in the third quarter, with more than 20 Leo launches planned for 2026. Seven have flown this year, and none since July 2.
By July the promise had become initial service "this year". Thursday's earnings call repeated it. About 390 Leo satellites are in orbit, against more than 11,000 Starlinks.
Atlas V flew its last Leo mission in July. Vulcan has been grounded since February, and New Glenn has not carried a single Leo satellite yet. Ariane 6 last flew Leo satellites in June.
Leo is at least a quarter behind the plan Amazon gave investors six months ago, and the rockets are the bottleneck.
ULA has set Vulcan's return to flight for November 13, nine months after a solid booster nozzle failed on the USSF-87 launch in February. It was the second nozzle problem in four flights.
The mission carries 40 Amazon Leo satellites, the first of 38 Vulcan launches Amazon has bought. It is also the first Vulcan with six solid boosters. Earlier flights used two or four.
ULA says the investigation found "several potential contributors" and addressed them with design and process changes. It has not named a single root cause.
The Space Force has not cleared Vulcan for military launches yet and will judge it on the data from this flight plus ground tests. This Amazon launch decides whether ULA gets its national security missions back.
Eutelsat's order book went from $3.8 billion to $13.5 billion in one quarter.
Almost all of the jump is IRIS², the EU's 330-satellite network, which has now entered construction. That adds $9.9 billion of design and build work, to be booked mostly between 2027 and 2031. It is about seven times Eutelsat's total revenue last year.
The quarter itself was weak. Revenue from its four businesses fell 2.1% to $310 million, below the $324 million analysts expected. TV broadcasting dropped 18% to $122 million. Low Earth orbit revenue from OneWeb rose 30% to $79 million.
The TV business is shrinking faster than OneWeb is growing. For the next five years Eutelsat's numbers will depend on EU construction money far more than on its own customers.
Virgin Galactic flew its new spaceship, Apeiron, to Spaceport America yesterday. It is the first of the six-passenger Delta ships. Flight tests come first, and the first commercial flight is now set for early in the second quarter of 2027. Earlier the target was late 2026, then February 2027.
The company has not flown a paying customer since June 2024. Its cash fell from $911 million at the end of 2023 to $286 million in June 2026. Its own guidance points to another $175 to $190 million burned in the second half of this year, which leaves roughly $100 million going into 2027.
About 675 people hold tickets, and most of what they still owe gets paid only shortly before they fly.
One more slip and Virgin Galactic will likely have to raise money again before its first paying flight.
Telesat reported third-quarter results today. Its geostationary satellite business brought in $56 million, down 21% from a year ago, with only about 59% of its capacity in use. In the same quarter the company spent $263 million building Lightspeed, its new low Earth orbit network.
The two halves are financed separately. Lightspeed has about $4 billion of contracted backlog, and a bigger Canadian Armed Forces contract now pays for 225 satellites instead of 156. Service is planned around the end of March 2028.
The geostationary side has about $205 million of cash and about $2.2 billion of debt maturing between this December and October 2027. Telesat's own filing says there is substantial doubt it can continue as a going concern. Lenders have put a rescue offer on the table, and Telesat has not negotiated yet.
Lightspeed has its money. The old business can only survive through a deal with its lenders before December.
The US Air Force has shown what it flew inside SpaceX's Starfall capsule. Starfall launched on the Bandwagon-5 Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral on October 20, splashed down in the Pacific, and the cargo pods were brought back to Long Beach.
The pods carried a satellite-linked tracker, batteries, a seawater desalinator, food rations and emergency medical kit, with sensors logging temperature, shock and vibration through launch and reentry. Starfall is about 3.1 meters across and can bring back up to 1,000 kg from orbit.
The Air Force Research Laboratory's Rocket Cargo program aims at tens of tons per launch, delivered anywhere on Earth, which means much larger rockets. This flight shows military cargo can survive the trip. Fast delivery to a chosen spot on the ground is still a plan.
Elon Musk is a genius, a real genius, Putin said yesterday, while his digital minister presented Rassvet, Russia's answer to Starlink. The minister told him Starlink has more than 5,000 satellites. Independent trackers count close to 10,000 in service.
Rassvet has 31 production satellites in orbit after two Soyuz launches of 16 this year, and 26 have reached their working orbit at about 509 km. Bureau 1440, the company building it, planned 156 in orbit by the end of 2026 and 292 in 2027, when partial service should start. No next launch is on the schedule.
At 16 satellites per launch, getting to 156 by December would take eight more launches in two months. Russia will miss its own 2026 target by a wide margin.
The Space Force's first missile-tracking satellites will not launch this year. Space Development Agency director GP Sandhoo now targets spring 2027, nearly two years later than the original plan.
The agency has 84 satellites in orbit today. All of them relay data. None of them can track missiles, which is the main reason the constellation exists.
The plan ahead is big: six more Tranche 1 launches, then 190 transport and 54 tracking satellites in Tranche 2, a tracking-only Tranche 3 and 36 extra satellites for Golden Dome. Sandhoo counts about 474 satellites in total. Before ordering new sensors in large numbers, the agency now wants more flight demonstrations.
The US is planning Golden Dome around missile-tracking satellites it has not yet put in orbit.
Airbus Defence and Space booked $12.8 billion of orders in the first nine months of 2026, up 70% from a year ago. Revenue grew only 5%, to $10.4 billion.
Profit moved faster. Adjusted operating profit rose 60% to $749 million, a margin of 7.2% against 4.7% last year.
Space is the smaller part. Space Systems made about $2.4 billion in revenue, up 5.3%, which is 23% of the division. Its big third-quarter wins were 229 more OneWeb satellites for Eutelsat and platforms for at least 66 IRIS² satellites.
The merger of the Airbus, Thales and Leonardo space businesses is still waiting for EU competition approval. Airbus wants to sign the final agreement this year and close in 2027.
For now the growth at Airbus Defence and Space comes from defence. Space is still the slow part of the business.
Vivo, Telefónica's Brazilian operator with about 50 million customers, switched on Starlink satellite-to-phone service on Monday. Where there is no tower, customers can use WhatsApp messages and voice calls, maps and texts, free for 12 months on most plans.
A week earlier, on October 19, Telefónica signed a letter of intent with Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Vodafone to explore a joint European satellite-to-phone service. The four want their own spectrum and European ground infrastructure, with a satellite partner still to be chosen. The letter says it does not replace existing satellite deals.
So Telefónica is selling Starlink to Brazilians today while its European plan is still at the letter stage. For now, Starlink is what Telefónica can actually put in its customers' phones.
Fitch kept SpaceX's BBB+ rating today after the $40 billion Nvidia GPU lease. Its note also shows how concentrated SpaceX revenue has become.
One AI compute customer was 34.5% of SpaceX revenue in the third quarter. A year earlier that customer was below 10%. Those cloud contracts usually run three years, but either side can walk away with 90 days' notice.
The balance sheet looks solid: $89.9 billion in cash and short-term securities against $38 billion of debt, with nothing big due until 2031. The shares still fell about 3.5% today, with a Louisiana lawsuit over the Starbase tax deal adding pressure.
A third of revenue on a 90-day exit clause is a bigger risk for SpaceX than its debt.
Florida has not had a rocket launch since October 20, and none is on the calendar. SpaceX says the next Falcon 9 from Florida is at least six weeks away while it gets pad 39A ready for Starship.
The other operators can't fill the gap. ULA's Vulcan has been grounded since an anomaly in February, and Blue Origin's New Glenn is waiting on repairs to its launch complex at the Cape.
Florida flew a record 109 launches in 2025. This year it is at 60, while Vandenberg in California is already at 72. The Space Coast's numbers now depend almost entirely on when Starship starts flying there.
Simone Cortesi retweeted
🚨 In response 🚨 China has published pictures taken on their spysats of the ISS and of a Maxar satellite, a similar one to the satellite that shot pictures of the Chinese secret spaceplane.
Behold: The US Defense Intelligence Agency has released a report on challenges to security in space, including an NEI image of China’s spaceplane from Maxar, taken in 2024.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The images of a Maxar satellite (Sep 2025) and ISS (Oct 1 2025) were published by China's commercial Jilin-1 satellites, predating and unrelated to the recent US DIA spaceplane report.
scmp.com/news/china/sci…
universemagazine.com/en/vantors-res…
theaviationist.com/2026/10/27/cle…