Space · Monday, 21 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

Companies are making medicine in orbit. No regulator has written down how to approve it.

Drug companies are already building an artificial retina and printing human tissue on the space station. It is due to be switched off by 2030, and no medicines regulator anywhere has set out how to approve anything made up there.

flights LambdaVision has made to the space station since 2018

It hopes to begin testing its artificial retina in people in 2028. [1]

1,000 kg

the load a SpaceX Starfall capsule is meant to bring back to Earth

A third of it is sold two years before the first flight. [2]

None

medicines regulators with an approval route for something made in orbit

Britain's agency said in March it would publish one this year. [1]

The lead story — what happened

Drug companies are already making things aboard the International Space Station, and are now planning for it to be gone. [1]
LambdaVision has flown nine missions to the station since 2018, building an artificial retina by laying proteins and polymers onto a scaffold one layer at a time. [1]
Auxilium Biotechnologies has used a 3D printer on the station to make structures containing human liver, kidney and cartilage cells. [1]
Merck worked on station research that fed into a version of its cancer drug Keytruda given as an injection under the skin instead of a slow drip. [1]
The station was never built as a factory. The chief scientist of the body that rents out its American half calls it a test kitchen. [1]
Laboratory space, crew time and rides home are all scarce up there, so repeating one experiment can take months or years. [1]
NASA plans to retire the station by the end of the decade, and Starlab, Vast and Axiom Space are each building a private one to take the work. [1]
Executives say getting results back down is now a tighter squeeze than getting them up, because you cannot design the next experiment until the last one lands. [1]
Space Cargo Unlimited, a Luxembourg firm, has already sold a third of the 1,000kg a SpaceX return capsule will carry, and that capsule is not due to fly until 2028. [2]
No medicines regulator anywhere has set out how something made in orbit gets approved. Britain's agency said in March it would publish a plan this year. [1]

Already booked333 kg · 33%
Still for sale667 kg · 67%

Space Cargo Unlimited has sold about a third of the 1,000kg a SpaceX Starfall capsule can bring home. The capsule is not due to fly until 2028.

Who is involved

LambdaVision

a US biotech firm building an artificial retina, a patch meant to restore some sight; it has flown nine missions to the station since 2018
Michael Roberts

chief scientist of the ISS National Lab, which rents out the American half of the space station for research; he calls it a test kitchen
Starlab, Vast and Axiom Space

three companies building private space stations to replace the ISS; Starlab plans to rent out laboratory room and shared equipment
Varda Space Industries

a US company building small uncrewed capsules that process materials in orbit and drop them back to Earth
Space Cargo Unlimited

a Luxembourg firm that books room on other people's return capsules and resells it to researchers

How it unfolded

2018 the US Food and Drug Administration and NASA sign an agreement on medical work in space, and write no approval rules
Since 2018 LambdaVision flies nine missions to the station
March Britain's medicines agency says it will work with the UK Space Agency on guidance
This week Space Cargo Unlimited says a third of a 2028 return capsule is already booked
By 2030 NASA plans to retire the space station

Where this points

Watch whether Britain's medicines agency publishes its promised guidance this year, which would be the first written route from a factory in orbit to an approved medicine.

What is pushing on the whole day

The bar and the word are our reading of how hard each one is pushing today. The arrow is where it is heading. The evidence is in the stories below.

The space station winding down Building↑

NASA plans to retire the International Space Station by the end of the decade. [1] Russia sent three tonnes of food and fuel up to it on 16 September. [12] That freighter will be filled with rubbish in five months and burned up over the Pacific. [12]

Governments picking companies High↑

The US State Department is putting foreign-aid money behind American space firms, starting with $6.5m for satellite internet in southern Peru. [3] The Space Force gave prototype contracts to True Anomaly and Northrop Grumman. [5] It put up to $45m behind the software firm Sedaro. [16]

Sharper pictures of the ground Building↑

South Korea's Satrec Initiative will build four satellites that see detail ten centimetres across. [7] L3Harris is building fourteen Earth-watching satellites for Xoople, first launch 2028. [8] Finland's Kuva Space picked out 8,835 possible opium poppy plots in Afghanistan. [10]

Rides to orbit filling up High↑

Portal Space Systems bought a whole Falcon 9, and Maverick has filled most of it with ten Kepler satellites. [9] SpaceX is reported to be pausing its cheap shared-ride flights from late 2028. [9] Space Cargo Unlimited has booked seven flights on a European return capsule. [2]

The rest of the day

15 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Aid money buys American satellites

On 10 September the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, announced the Space Catalyst Partnership on a visit to Peru. [3] It is the first time the US State Department has openly steered foreign-aid money towards selling American space services abroad. Only countries that have signed the Artemis Accords, a US-written set of rules for how to behave in space, may take part, and Peru signed in 2024. The first project is a two-year, $6.5m scheme to bring satellite internet to villages in southern Peru. [3]

Why it matters — China has spent years building space links across Latin America, including a deep-space tracking station in Argentina. A US official would not bar aid recipients from also buying Chinese equipment, and said American standards should win on their own. [3]
03
Rocket Lab's $8bn deal nears the line

Rocket Lab's finance chief, Adam Spice, spoke at an industry conference in Paris on 14 September. [4] He said the company is on track to complete its $8bn purchase of Iridium by the second quarter of next year. [4] Iridium runs a satellite network that carries phone calls and data for ships, aircraft and places with no mast in reach. Rocket Lab builds rockets and satellites and sells launches, which is one-off money. [4]

Why it matters — Rocket Lab is paid when somebody buys a launch. Iridium's customers pay every month, whether anything launches or not.
04
Space Force orders cheap orbital watchers

The US Defense Department's Defense Innovation Unit and the Space Force's Space Systems Command announced a joint effort called GHOST-R on Friday. [5] It is meant to put low-cost cameras into the high orbit about 36,000km up, where the big communications satellites sit. True Anomaly and Northrop Grumman each won a contract to build a prototype vehicle, due to launch in 2028. The job is to look at other spacecraft up there, say what they are, and tell whether one has been damaged. Today a handful of expensive satellites do that work. [5]

Why it matters — Colonel Bryon McClain said prototypes that work will transition directly into the programme of record, the budget line that buys satellites in numbers. [5] That is the step a demonstration usually has to fight for.
05
States bid to host a space school

NASA set out the first details of a US Space Academy in a request for information on 10 September, and states have begun competing to host it. [6] President Trump ordered the school by executive order on 28 August, as a civilian answer to the military service academies. NASA wants a site of at least 300 acres with room for 1,200 undergraduates, able to grow to 4,000. The plan is to break ground in 2027, seat an interim group of 300 students at existing colleges in 2028, and open a permanent campus in 2031. [6]

Interim students, 2028300
The campus NASA wants1,200
Room to grow to4,000
The first 300 students would sit at other colleges in 2028. The permanent campus is meant to open in 2031.

Why it matters — Every state was invited to bid through its governor, and each proposal must include cost estimates. The last state contest President Trump launched, for Space Command's headquarters, took five years to settle. [6]
06
Korea aims for ten-centimetre pictures

Satrec Initiative, a South Korean satellite maker, will build four satellites able to pick out things about ten centimetres across on the ground, an executive told SpaceNews at the Paris conference. [7] They are to join a 64-satellite radar fleet Hanwha is building, which is meant to revisit any point every thirty minutes by 2031. To see that finely the satellites must fly below 400km, where thin air still drags on a spacecraft and wears it out. Hanwha said in July it will start with a test satellite near 500km and lower it in steps. [7]
0 cm15 cm30 cm
1. 1Satrec's satellite flying now25 cm
2. 2Airbus and Vantor, from 202820 cm
3. 3The four new Hanwha satellites10 cm
The number is the size of the smallest thing on the ground a satellite can pick out. Smaller is sharper.
Why it matters — The sharpest satellite pictures on sale today resolve about 25 centimetres, and Airbus and Vantor are both aiming at 20 centimetres from 2028. [7]
07
Fourteen satellites built to feed a model

L3Harris is building the first fourteen satellites of an Earth-watching fleet for a company called Xoople, with the first due to launch in 2028. [8] The two announced their partnership in April after several years of quiet work, and said at the Paris conference that parts are now being made. Xoople's chief executive, Fabrizio Pirondini, said the design is not aimed at human analysts at all, but at feeding computer models. Everything the satellites gather will be sent down raw and processed in data centres on the ground. [8]

Why it matters — Most Earth-watching companies are putting the computer on the satellite, to cut how much they have to send down. Xoople is doing the opposite and keeping all of it. [8]
08
Ten satellites fill a bought rocket

Maverick, a company that packs other people's satellites onto rockets, has booked ten spacecraft for Kepler Communications onto a Falcon 9 that Portal Space Systems bought outright. [9] Portal paid for the whole rocket last month for a mission it calls Motus Via Sol, then hired Maverick to sell the room it did not need. The Kepler booking takes most of what was left. Maverick has run without outside investment since 2019, so it fills other people's rockets rather than buying its own. [9]

Why it matters — SpaceX is reported to be pausing its cheap shared-ride flights from late 2028. Companies that assemble those rides are buying or filling whole rockets to cover the gap. [9]
09
Satellites pick out poppy fields

Kuva Space, a Finnish satellite operator, published results from a trial that searched for opium poppy in Afghanistan's Helmand province. [10] Its Hyperfield satellites read the ground in hundreds of narrow colour bands instead of three, so different plants leave different patterns in the light. Combining 363 of its own images with free European ones, it flagged 8,835 possible poppy plots out of about 250,000 farm plots surveyed. It got the answer right 75% of the time, against 71% using the free images alone. [10]

Free European images71%
Kuva's satellites75%
Both find poppy fields about three times in four. Kuva's gain was in wrongly flagging fewer ordinary fields.

Why it matters — The real gain was fewer false alarms, which matters because poppy is often grown in among legal crops. Kuva says the method can be trained on coca and cannabis too, which opens a new kind of buyer: law-enforcement bodies. [10]
10
Second secret launch in six days

A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 9:07pm eastern time on 16 September, carrying a classified US Space Force payload called USSF-259. [11] It was the second classified Space Force launch in six days. The webcast ended shortly after the first stage landed on a ship in the Pacific, about eight and a half minutes in, and said nothing about the satellite itself. [11]

Why it matters — Nobody outside the programme knows what went up. The same booster, number 1097, had now landed thirteen times, and made SpaceX's 600th landing of an orbital rocket in April. [11]
11
Three tonnes of supplies reach the station

Russia launched the uncrewed Progress 96 freighter on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan on 16 September, carrying about three tonnes of food, fuel and supplies to the International Space Station. [12] It was due to dock two days later. The freighter it replaces, Progress 94, left the station on 7 September and burned up. Progress 96 will stay attached about five months, then be loaded with rubbish and sent down over the Pacific. Seven people are living aboard. [12]

1 of 4
cargo craft serving the space station
Four different ships carry supplies up. Only SpaceX's Dragon comes back in one piece; the other three burn up.

Why it matters — Four different craft carry cargo to the station, and only SpaceX's Dragon survives the trip home. [12] Everything else that goes up as supplies comes down as ash, which is the squeeze the lead story runs into.
12
A dark nebula wins the year's prize

The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, named the winners of the 2026 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. [13] The overall winner, called The Quiet Predator, was taken by Ali Alobaidly in Kuwait. It shows the Shark nebula, a dense cloud of dust about 650 light years away in the constellation Cepheus, lit blue by a few stars sitting inside it. The cloud is so dark that Alobaidly needed more than 28 hours of observing to build the picture. [13]

Why it matters — Every one of these was taken from the ground on Earth, not from a space telescope. The runner-up, by Kfir Simon in Israel, shows far-off galaxies shining through the gas of the Helix nebula. [13]
13
Where the first giant black holes grew

A team led by Alessandro Trinca at the University of Edinburgh published work in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on where the universe's earliest giant black holes could have formed. [14] The James Webb Space Telescope has found such objects less than a billion years after the Big Bang. [14] That is too early for them to have grown the usual way, from dying stars collapsing and slowly merging. The team modelled a different route: a huge cloud of cold gas falling straight in on itself. [14]

Why it matters — The work is about which neighbourhoods allow that to happen, not about whether it did. It points telescopes at crowded regions where dark matter was merging. [14]
14
Jupiter's moons start eclipsing each other

Jupiter's four large moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, have entered a season in which they pass in front of one another and cast shadows on each other as seen from Earth. [15] Their orbits are tilted by less than a degree from Jupiter's equator, so the line-up with our view only comes round about every six years. This season runs into early 2027, and the middle of it falls around mid-October. Jupiter is now visible before dawn. [15]

Why it matters — These events can be watched through a modest telescope, and the season's dates are published well in advance. [15]
15
Space Force funds a whole-fleet simulator

Sedaro, a US space software company, will receive up to $45m in government money. [16] It expands a platform that lets the US Space Force work out how different satellites, sensors and other equipment perform together. [16] The tool models a whole set of spacecraft rather than one, so planners can see what changing one part does to the rest. [16]

Why it matters — The money buys no hardware. It pays for the tool that checks whether satellites bought from different suppliers work as one set.
16
Radar firm courts Europe's rocket

Iceye, a Finnish company that builds and flies radar satellites, is exploring with Arianespace whether Europe's Ariane 6 rocket could launch its missions for European government customers. [17] It also set up Iceye Korea in August under Eric Rhee, signed an agreement with Seoul National University, and formed a partnership with the South Korean operator KT Sat. Radar satellites see through cloud and at night. The moves follow a funding round of more than $1bn. [17]

Why it matters — Governments increasingly want satellites of their own rather than pictures bought from abroad. Iceye is answering that by putting engineers and factories inside each country, not just sales staff. [17]

02 Lesson why it matters

Showing it works and making enough of it are two different jobs

A company can prove its method works in orbit and still have no way to make more than a handful of anything.

The twist

An experiment that works in orbit is a long way from a product, because making a lot of something needs a different machine from proving it once.

The picture

9LambdaVision's trips to the space station since 2018

People given its artificial retina so farnone

Nine flights in eight years have shown the method works in orbit. The company hopes to start testing the implant in people in 2028.

How it works

Something new works once, in a shared laboratory
Proving it used a scarce machine somebody else owns
Making a lot of it needs a different machine
Nobody's budget covers the second machine
So the idea waits, sometimes for years

The same force, elsewhere today

Where this chain is also running, in today's other stories.

The Space Force's GHOST-R contracts

True Anomaly and Northrop Grumman each fly one prototype in 2028, and a separate decision later is what buys any in numbers
Kuva Space's poppy study

the trial over Helmand was run to show the method works at all, and the law-enforcement buyers it was aimed at have not bought anything yet
The US Space Academy

the first 300 students would sit at other colleges in 2028, years before the campus meant to hold 1,200 of them exists
Hanwha's sharper satellites

one test satellite flies at 500km first so engineers learn what the thin air does to it, before the four working ones go lower

Where you've seen this

Cooking

one perfect dish in a home kitchen says nothing about serving four hundred people a night

Vaccines

a shot that works in a trial still waits on factories that can fill hundreds of millions of vials

Electric cars

a working prototype is the easy part, and building the same car ten thousand times a week is where firms fail

The catch

Some ideas are meant to stop at the demonstration, and a method that works once in orbit is not always worth a factory.

And the whole of it

The scientist proves the method, the capsule company sells the ride, and the regulator waits for a rule somebody else has to write. Each can see their own part clearly, and none of them can see the person who would one day be given the medicine.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

Drug companies are already making things in orbit: an artificial retina, printed liver and kidney tissue, and a cancer drug reworked after research on the space station. [1] No medicines regulator anywhere has yet written down how anything made up there would be approved for sale. [1]

Why it works on us — A fixed end date makes an unfunded plan sound like a scheduled one, and every company in this story is quoting the same 2030 retirement.

Who gains

Space Cargo Unlimited, which resells room on other people's return capsules — It has sold a third of a SpaceX capsule's 1,000kg two years before that capsule flies, and holds bookings on five other return vehicles. [2]
American space firms selling abroad — The US State Department will now spend foreign-aid money helping other governments buy American space goods, starting with $6.5m in Peru. [3]
True Anomaly and Northrop Grumman — Both won Space Force prototype contracts that carry a written path straight into the programme that buys the satellites in numbers. [5]
Maverick, a launch packer that owns no rockets — Portal Space Systems paid for a whole Falcon 9 and Maverick sells the leftover room, most recently ten satellites for Kepler Communications. [9]
Whichever US state wins the Space Academy — NASA wants at least 300 acres and a campus for 1,200 students rising to 4,000, and every governor was invited to bid. [6]
Britain's medicines regulator — If it publishes the guidance it promised in March, it will be the first anywhere to define how a medicine made in orbit gets approved. [1]

Who pays

Companies whose experiments sit in the queue — Laboratory room, crew time and rides home on the space station are all scarce, so repeating one experiment can take months or years. [1]
Small satellite operators buying shared rides — SpaceX is reported to be pausing its cheap shared-ride flights from late 2028, which is why packers are buying whole rockets and reselling the room. [9]
Farmers in Helmand province, Afghanistan — Kuva Space flagged 8,835 plots as possible opium poppy out of about 250,000 surveyed, and says its next buyers are law-enforcement bodies. [10]
Countries that have not signed the Artemis Accords — Only signatories may take part in the US State Department's new space-aid partnership. [3]
Anyone needing something brought back from orbit — Of the four cargo craft serving the space station, only SpaceX's Dragon returns in one piece; the other three burn up. [12]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

Whether any medicines regulator will write an approval route, and when.

The US Food and Drug Administration signed an agreement with NASA in 2018 and has produced no framework since; it did not answer Reuters' questions. Britain's agency promised a plan this year and has not published it. [1]
02

What a medicine made in orbit would cost to produce.

Nobody in the reporting gave a figure. Companies say private stations could be much cheaper than the space station, which is a comparison with no numbers attached to either side. [1]
03

Whether SpaceX's Starfall capsule flies in 2028 at all.

It has never flown, and it is meant to ride on Starship, whose first attempt to reach orbit is now set for 28 September. [18] A third of the capsule's 1,000kg is already sold. [2]
04

How much money the new US space-aid scheme actually has.

A senior State Department official said there is no overall programme number, and that the department is pairing existing pots of foreign aid to projects as they come together. [3]
05

Which company will build the Peru satellite-internet network.

State Department officials would not say, and would not say how much beyond the first $6.5m they expect to raise. [3]
06

Which state will get the US Space Academy, and who pays for the campus.

NASA has asked every state for a proposal including cost estimates and has published none of its own. Ground is meant to be broken in 2027. [6]
07

Whether cheap commercial satellites can really watch the high orbit.

That is what the Space Force's two GHOST-R prototypes are for, and neither True Anomaly's nor Northrop Grumman's vehicle flies before 2028. [5]
08

How many of Kuva Space's 8,835 flagged plots really grow poppy.

The study reports 75% accuracy against 71% for free European images, and says the real gain was fewer false alarms. No check on the ground is reported. [10]
09

What the US Space Force's USSF-259 satellite is for.

The mission is classified and the webcast was cut shortly after the booster landed. [11]

04 Hope carry this

Merck worked on research aboard the space station that fed into a new form of its cancer drug Keytruda: an injection under the skin, instead of sitting through a slow drip into a vein.

Also true today

The 2026 Astronomy Photographer of the Year was won by Ali Alobaidly in Kuwait, for a picture of the Shark nebula 650 light years away. He built it out of more than 28 hours of watching one patch of sky.
Jupiter's four large moons have begun passing in front of one another and casting shadows on each other as seen from Earth. The season runs into early 2027 and can be watched through a modest telescope.