With the International Space Station likely to have only a three-person crew for an extended period, researchers expect there will be less time devoted to research. SpaceNews.com

Virgin Galactic’s chief executive says the company is approaching the “next phase” of the flight test program for the company’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle as the company’s founder predicts the company reaching space in “weeks.” SpaceNews.com

As one group of engineers continues to diagnose a gyro problem that has sidelined the Hubble Space Telescope, another is dealing with a problem that has put operations of another large space observatory on hold. SpaceNews.com

Luck is not a plan. Yet up to now Congressional appropriators and senior NASA officials are mostly relying on luck to keep us safe from catastrophic fatalities resulting from the surprise impact of an unseen asteroid. SpaceNews.com

The next-generation crewed spacecraft will be the payload for the first flight of the Long March 5B launch vehicle, a variant of the Long March 5 and designed for lofting large modules of the planned Chinese Space Station. SpaceNews.com

Defense officials have been sounding alarms about what they describe as a glaring national security vulnerability — a new class of ultrafast weapons being developed by China and Russia that would overpower U.S. missile defenses. SpaceNews.com

Roscosmos now says one of the Soyuz rocket’s four strap-on boosters failed to properly separate and nicked the core stage. SpaceNews.com

The Senate confirmed James Morhard to be NASA’s deputy administrator late Oct. 11. SpaceNews.com

Members of an independent NASA safety panel said they were worried that the Oct. 11 Soyuz launch failure could make safety concerns with the agency’s commercial crew program even worse. SpaceNews.com

Arianespace said Oct. 11 it’s too soon to say whether the Soyuz-ST rockets it uses to launch satellites from South America will be grounded following the failure of a Russian Soyuz-FG rocket carrying crew to the International Space Station. SpaceNews.com

Phase 2 of the Launch Service Agreement will be an open competition. All there winners have to compete - or they would have to return their development funds back to the government. SpaceX presumably would bid as well. SpaceNews.com

LeoSat’s strategic partners, Spanish satellite operator Hispasat and Sky Perfect Jsat of Japan, are helping the constellation developer update its satellite design. SpaceNews.com

Fresh off the success of a recent contract win to connect IBM Cloud customers with O3b satellites, SES’s chief executive said many of the operator’s future geostationary satellites will have attributes of O3b to appeal to more cloud networks. SpaceNews.com

With Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft grounded for an indefinite period, NASA managers said Oct. 11 that they will look at ways to keep the current International Space Station crew in orbit for an extended period if needed. SpaceNews.com

Thursday’s dramatic launch abort was the first time a crewed spacecraft bound for the ISS has suffered a mission critical failure. But it was not the first time that a manned Soyuz rocket has been forced to activate its launch abort system. SpaceNews.com

An American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut are reported to be in good condition after a problem with their Soyuz rocket minutes after liftoff Oct. 11 forced them to abort their mission to the International Space Station and make an an emergency landing in Kazakhstan. SpaceNews.com

Like SES, government agencies and space companies are applying artificial intelligence to various problems they face. SpaceNews.com

The U.S. Air Force announced on Wednesday it is awarding three contracts collectively worth about $2 billion to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems and United Launch Alliance to develop launch system prototypes. SpaceNews.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Loon, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is promoting networking technology and user interfaces it developed to operate its high-altitude balloons for constellations of nongeostationary orbiting satellites. “Our network on Loon and these low Earth orbit and medium Earth orbit constellations have a lot of similar challenges in network operations,” […] SpaceNews.com

Switching from SLS to the Falcon Heavy may cause some trade-offs in designing both the Europa Clipper and the Europa Lander to fit the smaller rocket. However, the cost savings could be plowed into an Enceladus orbiter. SpaceNews.com