The Overview · your week in space

From The Decisional Pass

Last week I put Chang'e 7 on the "on deck" list for Sunday. It didn't go. A tropical storm set up next to Hainan, and China's most ambitious robotic Moon mission went from a launch window to a 2027 problem. Around that: two astronauts finished a job they'd left half done, Ariane 6 flew farther than it ever has, and NASA gave up on saving a telescope it's flown for 21 years.

🌕 A typhoon cost China a year on the Moon

Chang'e 7 was set to lift off August 24 on a Long March 5 from Wenchang. Hours before the window, the China Manned Space Engineering Office called it off: the mission "does not meet the launch requirements and cannot be carried out within the scheduled launch window this year." Typhoon Narra was spinning up over the Gulf of Tonkin, right next door. Reporting since points at 2027.

Here's why weather costs a year and not a few days. This isn't a satellite delivery. The orbiter has to reach polar lunar orbit weeks or months before the landing so it can photograph candidate sites, and the lander wants a patch near Shackleton crater where the lighting holds for a long stretch. Miss that geometry and the next good one isn't next week. What's still in the building is an orbiter, a lander, a rover and a hopper built to fly into permanently shadowed craters hunting water ice, plus an ILOA camera and a Thai space-weather instrument. It's the scout for a Chinese crewed landing around 2030. Wenchang sits on a tropical coast in typhoon season, which is the bill you pay for launching heavy over open water. Watch the race on our lunar dashboard.

References: SpaceNews · Scientific American · Space.com

🛰️ They went back out and finished it

Last week Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot ran out of clock with the new antenna still in the box. On August 25 they went back out and got it done in 6 hours 30 minutes: spare space-to-ground antenna installed and connected, failed unit secured to a spare-parts platform on the truss. That dish is the high-rate link between Houston and the station. Call from the ground when they finished: "You just saved the video dish."

Two spacewalks and about 13 hours of crew time to swap one antenna. That's not a failure, it's the honest cost of maintaining hardware bolted outside for years. U.S. spacewalk 98, Menon's third and Adenot's second, and the 283rd for the station.

References: NASA · Space.com

💫 Swift is coming home the hard way

NASA and Katalyst Space called off the reboost of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Swift launched in 2004 to chase gamma-ray bursts, and two decades of drag have walked it below 400 km. Katalyst's LINK spacecraft, contracted 11 months ago for about $30 million and launched July 3, was going to grab Swift's structure with a gripper and push it back toward 600 km over two or three months.

LINK never got the chance. It ended up in a multi-axis spin with two of its three reaction wheels gone. The team clawed the rate down from 9 degrees per second to 1.47 and uploaded new attitude controllers on August 11, and it still wasn't steady enough to capture anything. Swift was never built to be serviced and has no grapple fixture, and 11 months isn't much time to build the thing that grabs it. NASA expects Swift to reenter later this year. The attempt was still worth making.

References: SpacePolicyOnline · SpaceNews

🌍 Ariane 6 finally went the distance

On August 27 at 22:11 CEST, Ariane 6 lifted MTG-I2 off the pad in French Guiana on flight VA270. First run to geostationary transfer orbit for the rocket, the farthest it's flown, and its fourth flight this year. MTG-I2 completes the first three-satellite Meteosat Third Generation set for Eumetsat, imaging Europe and northern Africa every 2.5 minutes. It also carries a Lightning Imager that watches for strikes continuously, which European weather satellites have never had.

References: ESA · Arianespace

🔭 A very wide eye goes up Sunday

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was sealed inside its Falcon Heavy fairing on August 24 and launches at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, August 30, from pad 39A, bound for L2. It carries a 2.4-meter mirror, same class as Hubble's, feeding a 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument with a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's infrared camera. Same sharpness, much bigger bite. It's built to chase dark energy and run a microlensing census of planets across the galaxy, with a coronagraph along as a tech demo.

References: NASA · ESA

⚡ Quick hits

• Counters. SpaceX flew its 100th orbital mission of 2026 on August 21, and on the 25th booster B1067 flew for the 37th time, a Falcon 9 reuse record, on the 654th Falcon landing. (Spaceflight Now · Spaceflight Now)
• Starship Flight 14 slipped out of August. Musk said on the 20th that catching the ship with the tower is "probably a few months" off, not next flight. (SpaceNews)

Space stocks — 7-day movers

Delayed market data via Yahoo Finance — for information only, not investment advice.

Track it all live — who's in orbit right now, the lunar race, and every agency and company on the map — at Orbital Roster.

Forwarded this? Get The Decisional Pass in your inbox: