Space digest — Nov 7, 2026
Top line: Blue Origin has formally moved New Glenn's return to flight to January 2027 — a memo from CEO Dave Limp that ends the year-end flight pledge and says the cause of May's pad explosion is fixed. Separately, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched a classified U.S. Space Force mission from California.
- New Glenn's return to flight is now officially January 2027
- SpaceX flies a classified Space Force payload from Vandenberg
New Glenn's return to flight is now officially January 2027
Sources Glitchwire LAVX
What happened: Blue Origin chief executive Dave Limp told employees in an internal memo that New Glenn's return to flight is "proactively updating our anticipated launch date to January 2027" — roughly ten days past the earlier internal target and formally breaking the pledge to fly again before the end of 2026. The grounding traces to the May 2026 explosion that destroyed a first-stage booster during a ground test at Cape Canaveral and wrecked the LC-36 launch pad; summer weather slowed its rebuild. Limp shared the update alongside the new GS3 third stage and Northstar booster engine unveiled at the UP.Summit at Kennedy Space Center.
What's genuinely new: The memo makes the January 2027 target the company's own position rather than a figure from people familiar with the matter. It says the team has "found and fixed the issue that caused the anomaly" — the BE-4 main oxygen valve failure identified in August — without explaining the retrofit, and puts a hot-fire of the next upper stage at NASA's Stennis Space Center one to two weeks out. The New Glenn backlog now holds Amazon Leo satellites, NASA lunar lander missions and national-security payloads.
Watch: whether the January target holds, and the outcome of the Stennis upper-stage hot-fire.
SpaceX flies a classified Space Force payload from Vandenberg
What happened: A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on November 6 carrying USSF-432, a classified mission for the U.S. Space Force. It was the 119th Falcon 9 launch of 2026 and the 14th national-security flight of the year.
What's genuinely new: Neither SpaceX nor the Space Force has said what flew: SpaceX cut its webcast about ten minutes in, shortly after the first stage landed on the droneship "Of Course I Still Love You," wrapping that booster's eighth flight. Outside observers speculate the payload is a batch of classified low-Earth-orbit satellites for the Space Force's Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, built on the military-oriented Starshield bus, based on rocket-stage drop zones that match earlier Starlink launches.
Watch: whether the payload or its orbit is ever disclosed, and the next Starshield-manifested military launch.
Links: Space.com · NASASpaceflight on X · Nov 6, 10:50 PM ET
Brief
- SpaceX stock (SPCX) fell 9.05 percent on November 5 then rose in pre-market trading as Democratic midterm-election wins raised concerns about tighter rules for AI data centers, per TipRanks — despite Q3 revenue of $14.58 billion, up 161 percent year over year, with net profit of $4.4 billion. Morgan Stanley nearly doubled its 2027 and 2028 revenue forecasts to $175 billion and $289 billion.