Russian Reliance on Chinese Satellites

SAR satellites Taijing-4-03, a Chinese radar satellite flying under the Russian cover name Okulus-01. Source Flying under the radar: Russia’s tacit reliance on Chinese SAR satellites (part 1) by Bart Hendrickx Monday, October 12, 2026 Russia currently operates only a handful of government-owned radar imaging satellites, prompting several private startups to step in to fill this gap in the domestic remote sensing market. To secure these capabilities, many of these entities have discreetly turned to China’s commercial space industry. This low-profile cooperation is unfolding across three distinct levels: white-labeling orbiting Chinese satellites under Russian cover names, engineering domestic satellite buses to house imported Chinese radar payloads, and actively marketing Chinese radar imagery to Russian state and commercial consumers. The current status of Russian radar satellites Only three Roscosmos radar satellites are currently operational: Kondor-FKA-1 and Kondor-FKA-2 (launched in May 2023 and November 2024) and Obzor-R (launched in December 2025). The Kondor satellites rely on mechanically deployable S-band radars. Obzor-R, transmitting in the X-band, is the first Russian radar satellite to be equipped with an active phased array antenna. While officially billed as purely civilian remote sensing assets, all three platforms probably also support military intelligence requirements. Last year’s launch of Obzor-R was heavily shrouded in secrecy and not publicly acknowledged by Roscosmos until recently. Statements made by corporate executives last year indicated that the home-built Okulus was not expected to fly until 2028 at the earliest. It therefore came as a complete surprise when clear indications emerged last April that the deployment of the first operational satellite was imminent. The Russian military currently operates a single radar satellite under the official name Kosmos-2550. Internally known as Pion, it is a specialized ocean reconnaissance satellite designed to accurately pinpoint the location of military vessels. Although officially declared operational by Russia in November 2022, high-resolution ground-based photographs of the satellite strongly suggest that one of its two radar antennas failed to deploy. [1] No follow-on satellite is expected to be launched in the near future. Meanwhile, work has been underway for over a decade on a separate series of military X-band radar satellites called Araks-R, but the project has suffered numerous delays and has still not seen a single launch. Many of these delays are likely caused by Western sanctions that have hampered the import of radiation-hardened microelectronics, which are critical, among other things, for the assembly of advanced synthetic aperture radar payloads. Novyy Kosmos’ Okulus project One of the private companies aiming to compensate for the lack of radar satellites is Moscow-based Novyy Kosmos (“New Space”), a startup founded in October 2021 which has been working on a radar satellite called Okulus. Some basic details regarding the platform are available from the company’s public website and promotional materials. The spacecraft weighs 448 kilograms and is intended to operate in a 97.2° inclination Sun-synchronous orbit at an average altitude of 475 kilometers. Its X-band radar operates within the 9.3–9.8 gigahertz range and is advertised to produce images with resolutions of 2 meters in spotlight mode, 5 meters in stripmap mode, and 20 meters in ScanSAR mode. Confusingly, the company’s website also lists a 0.4-meter maximum spatial resolution alongside an additional Ku-band radar capability. [2] SAR satellites Basic parameters of Okulus on the Novyy Kosmos website. Source SAR satellites Model of Okulus. Source The stated goals of Okulus are to provide all-weather, high-resolution radar monitoring of critical linear infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines, power lines, and railways. Utilizing advanced synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry, the platform is designed to track ground subsidence under these structures with a precision of up to 5 millimeters, while also monitoring quarries and metallic accumulations. Furthermore, it serves vital civil and environmental functions, including flood and forest fire management, agricultural optimization, and mapping ice dynamics along the Northern Sea Route. Company officials have frequently emphasized that 80% of the satellite’s components will be manufactured within Russia—a crucial asset in an industry heavily restricted by Western sanctions. Novyy Kosmos aims to field a constellation of three Okulus satellites. A technical schematic displayed during an interview with the company’s CEO Anton Alekseyev two years ago suggests that plans have been considered to launch all three spacecraft simultaneously aboard a single Soyuz-2 carrier rocket equipped with a Fregat upper stage. SAR satellites Soyuz-2 payload shroud configured to house three Okulus satellites. Source The surprise launch of Okulus Statements made by corporate executives last year indicated that the home-built Okulus was not expected to fly until 2028 at the earliest. Some early private funding had been secured for the project (expected to cost 1 billion rubles or roughly $11.5 million), while engineering designs for the satellite's radar were reportedly being finalized. [3] It therefore came as a complete surprise to observers when clear indications emerged last April that the deployment of the first operational satellite was imminent. On April 12, just a day after Roscosmos chief Dmitriy Bakanov explicitly mentioned Novyy Kosmos during a high-profile meeting with President Vladimir Putin, the company’s chairman, Dmitriy Matsuk, noted on the company’s social media platform that the firm was “getting down to on-orbit flight tests of its first commercial radar satellite.” [4] On the same day, a blog post by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin highlighting the city's commercial space sector revealed that Okulus would be placed into orbit later that month. [5] The document reveals that Novyy Kosmos is actively offering data from two operational Okulus satellites already in orbit. Following this announcement, no further updates surfaced until mid-June, when Matsuk was quoted on the company's website confirming that the first satellite had indeed been successfully launched in April and was undergoing the in-orbit tests necessary for “the further development of the company’s products in the field of radar imaging.” [6] Curiously, Matsuk’s statement went entirely unnoticed and was not picked up by any mainstream Russian media outlets. In a news report published on the company’s website in late July, Novyy Kosmos CEO Anton Alekseyev sowed confusion by describing Okulus as a project "under development." Contradicting this statement, however, the report was accompanied by a high-resolution radar image of a sports stadium credited to a satellite called Okulus-01. [7] SAR satellites Radar picture credited to Okulus-01. Source Okulus was showcased again during a presentation given by an official from Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations in early September. Speaking about the ministry’s use of satellite data obtained by private companies, he displayed high-resolution radar strips of Russia’s Arctic region and the southwestern Volgograd region captured by Okulus in early and late June 2026. [8] SAR satellites Pictures taken by Okulus in June 2026. Source Finally, during a meeting with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on September 22, Roscosmos chief Dmitriy Bakanov officially confirmed that the Okulus satellite had been successfully orbited earlier in the year and was actively furnishing radar data to several federal executive agencies. Novyy Kosmos officials responded enthusiastically on their corporate platform, framing the launch as a major milestone for Russia’s private space sector and underlining that its imagery would serve both government and commercial clients. [9] All these public disclosures presented analysts with a conundrum. Announcements from both Novyy Kosmos and Roscosmos claimed a satellite named Okulus was deployed in April and delivering active data within months, despite statements by the company last year that the first flight was not expected until 2028. Furthermore, no satellite officially bearing the name Okulus had been placed into orbit in April. The most obvious explanation was that Okulus was tucked inside a cluster of six unnamed military satellites launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome on April 16 by a Soyuz-2 rocket with a Volga upper stage. Registered by US Space Command as Kosmos-2609 to 2614, five of these payloads triggered intense Western scrutiny in mid-May when they executed high-energy maneuvers to lock themselves into orbits that were nearly coplanar with those of the Finnish-American radar satellites ICEYE-X36 and X37. [10] ICEYE has provided radar data to support Ukraine’s armed forces in the war against Russia, raising speculation that the five Russian satellites might be on an inspection mission or have some type of anti-satellite capability. Possibly, Okulus was the sixth satellite, hitching a ride into an orbit far away from that of the ICEYE satellites. The Chinese connection of Okulus The Okulus story took a new turn when Novyy Kosmos recently released an updated user guide for customers wishing to purchase customized remote sensing data. Published inconspicuously on the company’s platform, the document reveals that Novyy Kosmos is actively offering data from two operational Okulus satellites already in orbit. The first, named Okulus-01, carries a Ku-band radar operating at a center frequency of 13.5 gigahertz. The second, named Okulus-02, houses an X-band radar transmitting at a center frequency of 9.6 gigahertz with an expansive 1,200 megahertz maximum signal bandwidth. The guide details a specialized processing service that enables customers to use these radar datasets to automatically detect and measure marine oil spills. [11] The following performance characteristics are given for the two satellites: Okulus-01(Ku-band) Mode Resolution Ground swath Sliding spotlight 1 0.5 m 5x5 km Sliding spotlight 2 0.5 m 20x10 km Stripmap 2 m 15 km ScanSAR 18-20 m 150 km Okulus-02 (X-band) Mode Resolution Ground swath Spotlight 0.5m 3x3 km Sliding spotlight 1 0.5 m 8x20 km Sliding spotlight 2 0.5 m 10x30 km Sliding spotlight 3 1 m 10x100 km Stripmap 2.5 m 25 km ScanSAR 1 7 m 45 km ScanSAR 2 15-20 m 100 km At the time the document was compiled, Okulus-01 was operational and supplying commercial data, while Okulus-02 was still undergoing in-orbit check-outs. Imagery from the second satellite was expected to become available for customers on August 1, 2026. Okulus-01 and 02 are in orbits with an average altitude of 530 and 535 kilometers respectively. They both have an inclination of 97.5° and cross the descending nodes of their orbits at 10:30 am local time. Closer analysis leaves no doubt that Okulus-01 is, in fact, a radar satellite built and launched by China on January 23, 2024, under the name Taijing-4-03. The orbital parameters detailed in the guide make it clear that Okulus-01 and 02 were not among the satellites launched from Plesetsk on April 16. The military payloads are in slightly higher orbits with more elevated inclinations. In addition to that, they cross the descending nodes of their orbits in the mid-afternoon, whereas the Okulus satellites do so in the mid-morning. Neither are there any other unidentified Russian satellites launched in recent months that match the orbital elements given for the two Okulus satellites. Closer analysis leaves no doubt that Okulus-01 is, in fact, a radar satellite built and launched by China on January 23, 2024, under the name Taijing-4-03. Manufactured by Beijing Weina Star Technology (better known by its international name MinoSpace), it is the world’s first commercial Ku-band SAR satellite. Only two other Ku-band radar satellites have been launched since—specifically China’s Airsat-01 (Zhongke-01) and Airsat-02 (Zhongke-02) in September 2024—but these were inserted into slightly lower dawn-dusk orbits with a Local Time of Descending Node (LTDN) of 6:00 am. Taijing-4-03 is a highly compact, ultra-thin flat-panel radar satellite. Utilizing an 80-kilogram active phased array antenna measuring 3.6x0.6 meters, it is based on Minospace’s MN200S platform and has an overall mass of 230 kilograms. SAR satellites Taijing 4-03. Source: Minospace. The orbital parameters published for Okulus-01 in the Novyy Kosmos user guide perfectly match those of Taijing-4-03 following its launch in January 2024. Catalogued by US Space Command as Object 2024-016D (NORAD number 58823), the satellite has not executed any orbital corrections since its deployment and has consequently decayed from the original 530 kilometers altitude down to approximately 385 kilometers. This has compressed the satellite’s ground footprint, which could explain why some of the swath widths and spatial resolutions marketed for Okulus-01 slightly differ from Taijing-4-03’s factory specifications seen below. [12] SAR satellites Radar performance data for Taijing-4-03. Source Less than two months after the launch of Taijing-4-03, MinoSpace released a sharp Ku-band capture of US Navy aircraft carriers moored at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. Although Novyy Kosmos executives have never openly acknowledged their ties with MinoSpace, they explicitly praised the aircraft carrier tracking capability of Taijing-3-04 in a paper on China’s remote sensing industry published in November 2025. More particularly, they singled out the platform's integrated, spaceborne AI processors that enable such automatic, real-time monitoring. [13] SAR satellites US Navy aircraft carriers imaged by Taijing-4-03. Source: Minosat. Okulus-02, an X-band radar satellite, is almost certainly a cover name for another Chinese satellite, but its identification is not as straightforward. There are four Chinese commercial X-band radar satellites launched after Taijing-4-03 that have been placed into an orbit corresponding to that of Okulus-02: Taijing-4-02A (built by MinoSpace), launched on May 21, 2025 Dongpo-16 (built by MinoSpace), launched on March 16, 2026 Juntian-1-04A (built by Beijing Juntian Space Technology), launched on March 16, 2026 Dianjian-1/Tianyi-50 (built by Spacety), launched on May 15, 2026 Chinese sources offer only baseline radar operating parameters for these platforms, making it impossible to positively identify any of them as Okulus-02. Taijing-4-02A and Dianjian-1 can likely be ruled out because their reported maximum swath widths of 240 kilometers significantly exceed the tighter 100-kilometer limit advertised for Okulus-02. Furthermore, Taijing-4-02A is likely to have completed its on-orbit shakedown and commissioning phases long before August 2026, when the second Okulus was declared operational. This leaves Dongpo-16 and Juntian-1-04A—launched together in March 2026—as the most probable candidates. Both feature a maximum spatial resolution of 0.5 meters that matches the specifications published for Okulus-02. To date, only a single swath width has been publicly disclosed for these platforms, namely “more than 25 kilometers” for Dongpo-16, which closely aligns with the parameters marketed for Okulus-02 in stripmap mode. Between the two, Dongpo-16 is a significantly more plausible candidate because it is built on the exact same MinoSpace MN200S satellite bus as Taijing-4-03 (Okulus-01). From a corporate procurement standpoint, Novyy Kosmos is far more likely to have secured a multi-satellite agreement with a single Chinese partner than with two competing manufacturers. SAR satellites Juntian-1-04A. Source: Juntian Space Technology. SAR satellites Dongpo-16. Source: MinoSpace MinoSpace is no newcomer to cooperative ventures with the Russian space industry. There is strong evidence that at least two of its high-resolution optical remote sensing satellites are actively being operated by the Russian defense contractor Stilsoft under the pseudonym Stilsat-1. These platforms, Taijing-3-02 and Taijing-3-04, were orbited together with Taijing-4-03 and Taijing-4-02A, respectively. While the exact commercial details of the arrangement between Stilsoft and MinoSpace remain unknown, Stilsoft maintains its own ground station infrastructure to command the satellites and downlink imagery. This independent operational capability strongly indicates that the assets have been turned over to the Russian firm on a complete turnkey basis. [14] SAR satellites Taijing-3-02 and Taijing-4-03 prior to launch. Source Whether this turnkey operational model also applies to Okulus-01 and Okulus-02 remains unclear. The possibility cannot be entirely ruled out for Taijing-4-03, which has no publicly identified anchor customers within the Chinese domestic remote sensing market. Conversely, Dongpo-16 and Juntian-1-04A were explicitly ordered from their respective manufacturers by domestic Chinese enterprises for localized remote sensing applications. Dongpo-16 forms part of a planned 20-satellite hybrid radar and optical constellation operated by Huantian Smart Technology. For this specific spacecraft, the operator teamed up with a regional partner, Xingyuan Space, to dedicate a portion of the platform's data capacity to the Jinjiang district of the city of Chengdu in southwestern China. This is why the satellite also bears the alternative name Jinjiang Xingyuan. Proving its domestic utility, Dongpo-16 was one of several satellites of the constellation to image the aftermath of the catastrophic glacier collapse on the China-Nepal border in August 2026. Meanwhile, Juntian-1-04A (also known by the alternative names Tianzhu-1 and Hawkview-1) is the first satellite in a planned SAR constellation operated by Dongfang Zhiyuan, which officially assumed operational control of the satellite in late August 2026. By characterizing the launch of Okulus as a domestic accomplishment, Bakanov possibly sought to create the impression that Russia is well on its way to achieving a goal to boost the contribution of private companies to Russia’s space program. If either of these platforms is indeed operating as Okulus-02, Novyy Kosmos cannot be its direct operator. Instead, the firm must have concluded a data-sharing agreement with one or more of these Chinese enterprises to obtain imagery gathered by the satellite during its overflights of Russian territory. Novyy Kosmos appears to have established similar arrangements with other Chinese commercial remote sensing operators. According to its own user guide, the company actively markets customized radar imagery from China’s HiSea-1 satellite, alongside optical datasets captured by the Chinese remote sensing satellite Jilin-1 Gaofen-04 (GF04). Furthermore, Russian customers can order high-resolution imagery obtained via Stilsoft’s Stilsat-1. Other platforms from which Novyy Kosmos routes data to its customers are three Sentinel radar satellites of the European Space Agency as well as an unidentified number of commercial ICEYE satellites. While the Sentinel imagery is available from open-access datasets, the current geopolitical context makes it is absolutely impossible for a Russian company to directly purchase imagery from ICEYE. This can only mean that the ICEYE data is being forwarded to Novyy Kosmos by one or more third parties. One final question is why Novyy Kosmos openly claims to have launched a single Okulus satellite in April 2026 while it is quietly marketing data from two (Chinese-built) Okulus satellites launched in January 2024 and (probably) March 2026. One remote possibility is that one of the six satellites launched from Plesetsk on April 16 is indeed a product of Novyy Kosmos itself, operating in orbit independently from the two Chinese-built satellites. Company officials have given some vague hints that the domestically produced Okulus would be preceded by one or more technology demonstrators carrying only sections of the radar. However, they may also have been referring to tests of these radar sections with the company’s Argos drones. A more likely scenario is that Novyy Kosmos did not launch its own satellite in April at all and is instead gathering data exclusively from the two Chinese satellites through commercial lease agreements. Naturally, any open admission of this would tarnish the reputation of Russia’s domestic space industry, which prides itself on its capability to substitute imported technology. In his meetings with Putin and Mishustin in April and September 2026, Roscosmos chief Bakanov portrayed Novyy Kosmos’ projects as an integral part of a new ten-year national space policy approved by Putin in June last year. This policy aims to boost the contribution of private companies to Russia’s space program from 5% to 35% by 2036. By characterizing the launch of Okulus as a domestic accomplishment, Bakanov possibly sought to create the impression that Russia is well on its way to achieving that goal. The organizational smokescreen even seems to extend to the engineering specifications for the home-built Okulus given on the website of Novyy Kosmos. The 0.4-meter maximum spatial resolution and the additional Ku-band radar capability mentioned there appear to apply only to the Chinese-built satellites, rather than to Novyy Kosmos’ own Okulus satellites. At aerospace exhibitions, Novyy Kosmos’ promotional materials for the home-built hardware present a far more modest capability, restricting the maximum resolution to 2.0 meters and omitting any mention of a Ku-band radar. Even if the Russian-built Okulus eventually makes it into space, it remains doubtful that it will consist of the 80% domestically sourced components officially claimed by the company. Novy Kosmos possesses no prior industrial experience in fabricating 400-kilogram-class satellite buses or radar payloads, and it has kept the identities of its manufacturing partners strictly classified. The active phased array radar planned for the domestic platform demands a vast quantity of highly sophisticated, space-qualified electronic components. Because these microelectronics face stringent Western sanctions blockades and are not mass-produced within the Russian Federation, Novyy Kosmos may well continue to rely on its Chinese partners to incorporate them into the Russian-built platforms. References Post by Austrian satellite watcher Felix Schöfbänker on the SeeSat forum. Okulus page on the Novyy Kosmos website. TASS report, June 17, 2025 ; Interviews with Novyy Kosmos CEO Anton Alekseyev during an exhibition in August 2025 and in Vestnik Glonass magazine, October 16, 2025. Statement by Matsuk on Novyy Kosmos’ social media platform, April 12, 2026. Blog post by Sergei Sobyanin, April 12, 2026. Report on the Novyy Kosmos website, June 17, 2026. Report on the Novyy Kosmos website, July 27, 2026. Video of presentations given during a security conference in Kazan, September 3-5, 2026 (see 3:49:20). Report on the Novyy Kosmos website, September 22, 2026 (includes video of the meeting between Bakanov and Mishustin). G. Gillinger, Is Russia maneuvering to threaten an ICEYE satellite?, Integrity News Flash, May 22, 2026. User guide on the Novyy Kosmos website. W. Yan et al, Design and on-orbit performance of Ku-band phased-array synthetic-aperture radar payload system, MDPI Sensors, October 12, 2024. A. Alekseyev, D. Matsuk, Satellite remote sensing of the Earth: global trends and China’s experience (in Russian), Universum, November 2025. B. Hendrickx, Stilsat-1: a Russian-owned and Chinese-built satellite watching Ukraine, The Space Review, part 1 (November 3, 2025), part 2 (November 10, 2025). Bart Hendrickx is a longtime observer of the Russian space program.

Soviet Bombers and Reconnaissance Satellites That Tracked Them

Bounder The Soviet M-50 Bounder bomber was reported in a breathless Aviation Week article in December 1958. Despite early claims, the plane was not nuclear powered, and did not have long range. It was photographed numerous times by American reconnaissance satellites during the 1960s, such as this mid-1960s photo of the M-50 at the Ramenskoye/Zhukovsky airfield near Moscow. (credit: Harry Stranger) Bounders and RAMs: satellites track a unique bomber at the Soviet Ramenskoye flight test center (part 1) by Dwayne A. Day and Harry Stranger Monday, October 12, 2026 In December 1958, the pages of Aviation Week were filled with breathless prose about an amazing new aircraft. According to a reporter writing for the magazine, a top secret, highly advanced high-speed aircraft was spotted in flight by multiple observers. There was no official confirmation of its existence, but it was clearly the kind of highly advanced airplane that the government would not want anybody to know about. The article was accompanied by an artist’s illustration of a sleek, bizarre-looking craft. Bounder Drawing of the M-50 that appeared in a December 1958 issue of Aviation Week. (credit: Aviation Week & Space Technology) Aviation Week (not yet “& Space Technology”) ran both an editorial and an article about the supersecret airplane. (“Soviets Flight Testing Nuclear Bomber,” December 1, 1958, p. 27). The article itself was authoritative sounding: “A nuclear-powered bomber is being flight tested in the Soviet Union. Completed about six months ago, this aircraft has been flying in the Moscow area for at least two months. It has been observed both in flight and on the ground by a wide variety of foreign observers from Communist and non-Communist countries.” The article continued: “The Soviet aircraft is a prototype of a design to perform a military mission as a continuous airborne alert warning system and missile launching platform.” Bounder There was even a model kid of the "nuclear-powered bomber." In reality, the M-50 had conventional propulsion, and has many design flaws. (credit: Aurora) The magazine was jumping to conclusions about a new Soviet bomber aircraft. It was not nuclear-powered. This was only a few years after the so-called “Bomber Gap,” an early example of Cold War military hysteria where estimates of Soviet military capabilities wildly exceeded the reality. Aviation Week was trying to start a new bandwagon rolling. But it didn’t work. And over the next decade, American reconnaissance satellites kept tabs on the new aircraft, but as they flew overhead and photographed the flight test facility, it became quickly apparent that the Soviets were not even building a handful of them. Early intelligence from the ground The CIA was paying attention to Soviet bomber developments in the late 1950s before the dawn of satellite reconnaissance, mainly by monitoring Soviet airfields and the airspace around them using observers in Moscow. Declassified reports indicate that intelligence analysts had detected a new Soviet bomber near Moscow in 1958, but were apparently not all that impressed. A secret December 23, 1958, CIA memo on “Long Range Aviation” stated that a new aircraft that the CIA designated “Bounder” had been observed in flight. It added that “sightings of the new Bounder aircraft indicate it may have a probe for aerial refueling.” The CIA believed that “Bounder is associated with” the Ramenskoye and Fili airfields near Moscow. The Soviet Union only built three M-50s, with only one taking flight. On July 9, 1961, the M-50 participated in a Soviet Aviation Day flyby, its only public appearance. A little over six months later, a June 2, 1959, CIA report on Soviet aircraft production stated that the Bounder was first observed in Moscow in August of 1958. It was considered “potentially supersonic and may be intended as a carrier of air-to surface missile(s).” In its current configuration, the CIA concluded that “should the USSR decide to produce this prototype in its present configuration, it would probably be a medium-range bomber comparable in range to Badger rather than Bison or Bear.” Thus, contrary to the “wide variety of foreign observers from Communist and non-Communist countries,” by mid-1959 the CIA did not consider the aircraft nuclear-powered, was not even sure if it was supersonic, and it certainly was not the long-range aircraft Aviation Week had breathlessly reported. The Soviets designated the airplane the Myasishchev M-50. It was a Soviet prototype four-jet engine supersonic strategic bomber that never entered service. The M-50 was constructed by the Myasishchev design bureau. NATO applied names starting with the letter “B” to Soviet bombers: Bear, Badger, Bison, etc., usually spelled out in all-caps. The Soviet Union only built three M-50s, with only one taking flight. The four engines were mounted in pods, with two under the wing and two more mounted to the wingtips. The second aircraft was designated the M-52 and had a different engine installation. It also had a wider cockpit with the pilots sitting side-by-side rather than one in front of the other. The M-52 appeared at the Fili airfield outside of Moscow, but never flew. The Soviets also built an unmanned M-51 cruise missile variant. There were no U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flights over Moscow during this time, although the CIA may have obtained photos of the planes from the ground. By August 1960, the United States began flying reconnaissance satellites, and over the subsequent years as they flew over Soviet airfields and aircraft production facilities, they did not photograph any more than the three airframes. On July 9, 1961, the M-50 participated in a Soviet Aviation Day flyby, its only public appearance. Although the M-50 was not nuclear-powered, the Soviet Union did test a nuclear-powered technology demonstrator, just like the United States had with the Convair NB-36H project. The Soviet aircraft was based upon the Tu-95 Bear and was designated the Tupolev Tu-95LAL. This was a test bed with the goal of testing the nuclear reactor shielding efficiency. The Tupolev Design Bureau was a competitor to Myasishchev. Bounder The sprawling airfield outside of Moscow that the CIA referred to as Ramenskoye, but Russians referred to as Zhukovsky, was where Soviet aircraft were flight-tested. It was the equivalent to Edwards Air Force Base in California. New aircraft were often spotted here first by American reconnaissance satellites. (credit: Harry Stranger) Monitoring Ramenskoye United States intelligence services kept track of the M-50 and its derivatives. Multiple reconnaissance satellites photographed an airbase outside of Moscow referred to as Zhukovsky by the Russians, after a nearby suburb. But during the Cold War the CIA referred to it by the name of another Moscow suburb, Ramenskoye. Officially known as the Flight Research Institute (or LII), the base was the Soviet equivalent to the famed Edwards Air Force Base in California. US intelligence reports were clear: “Ramenskoye is the most important flight test center in the USSR. All of the latest aircraft under development are usually tested at this base.” As of October 1965, Ramenskoye had two runways, one 17,000 by 350 feet (5,180 by 107 meters), and another that was 8,200 by 280 feet (2,500 by 85 meters). During many satellite overflights in the mid-1960s, only one Bounder aircraft was visible during a satellite pass, with multiple other aircraft spread around the airfield. Bounder This CIA map shows the two Moscow suburbs near the airfield. Although the CIA referred to the airfield as Ramenskoye, the Russians referred to it as Zhukovsky. (credit: CIA) Numerous large and small Soviet aircraft were visible at Ramenskoye during every reconnaissance satellite overflight as long as the skies were cloud-free, and photo-interpreters were always on the lookout for new aircraft. The M-50, with its distinctive four jet engines, was unique at the base, one of a kind. Since 1963, the M-50 was photographed at the Myasishchev area of the base. American photo-interpreters could discern the manufacturers of new Soviet aircraft by several means. One was what area of Ramenskoye they first appeared at. Another was their overall design style: different designers built planes that had a similar look, which was true of American aircraft companies as well. By 1963, the M-50 stayed in the same place each time it was photographed, an indication that it was no longer flying. The M-52 was photographed at Fili. Bounder Bounder New aircraft often were photographed by American satellites at Ramenskoye before they appeared anywhere else, such as the Yak-28-64 interceptor that was first spotted there in the mid-1960s. This drawing was made from a satellite photo. (credit: CIA) Ramenskoye was a target-rich environment for American photo-interpreters during the 1960s. In May 1966, a “probable new generation aircraft” was identified at the airfield. It was the fourth type of new generation aircraft observed on satellite photography at either Ramenskoye or Novosibirsky airfield since October 1965. In July 1966, a US satellite spotted a “new generation delta-wing aircraft” at Ramenskoye. Another “new generation aircraft” was also spotted at Ramenskoye at the same time. This was a swept-wing aircraft rather than a delta-wing. It also appeared to have two engines as well as wing pods. Bounder The Sukhoi Su-15 was an interceptor that was first spotted by an American satellite at Ramenskoye in the mid-1960s. This drawing was made from a satellite photo. The Su-15 was placed into production and served into the 1990s. (credit: CIA) By early June 1967, a total of six new generation fighter-type aircraft were observed at Ramenskoye, two of which were identified for the first time. By late July 1968, four new aircraft that were apparently not displayed at the Moscow airshow had been identified at Ramenskoye on satellite photography. These were: RAM A first spotted in May 1966 RAM B first spotted in May 1966 RAM D first spotted in May 1967 NOVO A first spotted in April 1966 RAM A was assessed to be the possible engine testbed for the Soviet Tu-144 supersonic transport. The British-French Concorde started production in early 1965 and first flew in 1969, and later the Tu-144 earned the nickname “Konkordski.” With only a small number of M-50s built, the CIA obviously did not consider the Bounder to be a threat. RAM B and presumably RAM C were apparently the aircraft spotted in summer 1966. The swept-wing aircraft was probably the Yak-28-64, which was developed to compete with Sukhoi Su-15, the delta-wing aircraft that appeared at Ramenskoye/Zhukovsky around the same time but had been flying in prototype form for a few years. The Su-15 proved more successful and was approved for production as a twinjet supersonic interceptor that served until the 1990s. It is possible that one of the aircraft was photographed by satellite earlier, but not identified until better imagery became available. Bounder Fili was another airfield outside of Moscow. The M-52 aircraft was photographed there by an American satellite. (credit: Harry Stranger) The M-50 quickly fades away With only a small number of M-50s built, the CIA obviously did not consider the Bounder to be a threat. In November 1969, the CIA produced a short report on the three M-50 aircraft, noting that all three had been moved since late 1967. “The Bounder which had been in the Myasishchev area of the Ramenskoye flight test center since September 1963 was missing from that area in March 1968, and is now on display at the air museum at Moscow/Monino airfield.” Bounder The M-52 aircraft was a modified version of the M-50. It appeared at Fili airfield outside of Moscow around 1963, but never took flight. Years later it was partially disassembled and moved by land to Ramenskoye. (credit: Harry Stranger) “The second Bounder aircraft, which had been at Moscow/Fili airfield since March 1963 is now in the Myasishchev area of Ramenskoye. It was observed being disassembled at Fili on ground photography of September 1967 and was not present there on satellite photography of November 1967. It appeared at Ramenskoye in June 1968 and was still there in October 1969.” Bounder The M-52 was moved to Ramenskoye in the later 1960s. Here it was photographed in 1971. (credit: Harry Stranger) “In March 1968, the remnants of the third Bounder (most of the wing and aft fuselage section) were moved, probably from a hangar in the Myasishchev area of Ramenskoye, to the structure test/derelict area where they are presently located. Movement of this third Bounder was probably necessitated by the arrival of the second one from Fili.” Bounder Bounder Bounder The M-52 photographed at Ramenskoye in 1974 and 1979. In the last photo, taken in 1980, the aircraft has been scrapped. (credit: Harry Stranger) “Because the Bounder now in the Myasishchev area at Ramenskoye had undergone several design modifications while it was at Fili, it is easily distinguishable from the Bounder moved from Ramenskoye to Moscow/Monino. The modifications consist of: A) shorter engine nacelles, B) removal of a section of the trailing edge of each wing tip at which point pods are attached, C) tapered trailing edge of wing, D) swept trailing edge of vertical stabilizer.” Bounder The M-50 Bounder bomber eventually ended up at the Monino museum outside Moscow. Here it was photographed in 1973. (credit: Harry Stranger) The M-50 is currently displayed at the Monino Museum outside Moscow. It has been photographed there by tourists, and satellites, countless times. Next: RAMS and shuttles. Further reading: Yefim Gordon and Dmitriy Komissarov, Myasishchev M-50 and M-52 – The First Soviet Supersonic Strategic Bomber, Schiffer, 2023. Harry Stranger’s website is https://spacefromspace.com/. Dwayne Day can be reached at zirconic1@cox.net. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted. Home Subscribe to our weekly newsletter email address

Space Debris Is Widespread

Debris A chart from a 2025 report on debris and active satellites in orbit, data that is already out of date. (credit: ESA) The tragedy of the orbital commons: Megaconstellations, space weapons, and debris by Alexander William Salter Monday, October 12, 2026 On September 14, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told a conference in Maryland that the United States “now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.” The next day the Space Force’s new chief, Gen. Douglas Schiess, confirmed it. A service statement described “kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation and even destruction, if necessary.” After decades of deliberate ambiguity, Washington has admitted that it keeps weapons in orbit. Now we need to think about what happens next, including how near-peer adversaries like China will respond. Ten years ago, I wrote a scholarly paper about the economics of orbital activities. In “Space Debris: A Law and Economics Analysis of the Orbital Commons,” published in the Stanford Technology Law Review, I treated cluttered orbits as a common-pool resource problem and worked through why neither markets nor governments had solved it. I treated cluttered orbits as a common-pool resource problem and worked through why neither markets nor governments had solved it. Time has only made the difficulties more acute. In a footnote I wrote that militaries can destroy spacecraft, but that the reputational cost was high enough that the scenario “can safely be ignored in most circumstances.” Five years later Russia blew up one of its own satellites at 485 kilometers, scattering more than 1,500 trackable fragments and sending the space station crew into their capsules for two hours. The United States responded in 2022 with a unilateral pledge never to conduct destructive anti-satellite missile tests, and 155 countries voted at the UN to follow suit. China and Russia voted no. Now we have acknowledged weapons in orbit too. Time has only made the difficulties more acute. When I wrote, about 1,400 working satellites orbited Earth. Today roughly 15,900 do. SpaceX’s Starlink alone accounts for about 11,000 of them. Last year 4,492 spacecraft reached orbit, up 62% from 2024. I want to revisit the paper’s argument, update the figures, and say where the analysis needs to go next. The problem NASA defines space debris as all human-made objects in orbit that no longer serve a useful purpose: spent upper stages, slag from solid rocket motors, dead satellites, and the fragments produced when any of those collide or explode. The danger is velocity. Objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) move at seven to eight kilometers per second, so even a small piece can destroy a satellite. Various space organizations have tried to estimate the number of debris pieces too small to track. For example, the European Space Agency estimates there are about 68,000 objects larger than ten centimeters, 1.5 million between one and ten centimeters, and 230 million smaller than that, totaling more than 17,000 metric tons. Some space debris is large enough to track. Surveillance networks give us reliable data about approximately 47,000 of them. The hardest category to deal with is in the middle, between one and ten centimeters in size: too small to track but large enough to ruin your day in the event of a collision. Two events account for a high fraction of debris. In January 2007 China destroyed its Fengyun-1C weather satellite in an anti-satellite test, producing 3,534 catalogued fragments, of which about 2,300 remain in orbit. That’s close to a fifth of all catalogued debris objects circling Earth. In February 2009 a dead Russian military satellite collided with an operating Iridium communications satellite. Russia’s 2021 anti-satellite test made things worse still. Atmospheric drag eventually pulls debris down. Within 200 kilometers of the surface that takes days; at 800 kilometers, near the peak of the debris population, centuries; in geosynchronous orbit, essentially forever. And those rates assume nothing new is added. The nightmare scenario, called the Kessler syndrome (after the NASA scientist Donald Kessler who described it in 1978), is a chain reaction in which collisions create debris and debris causes collisions until wide swaths of orbit become unusable. An economic typology Let’s dig into the economics. Many writers on space debris call orbit a public good. Economists mean something specific by that. Goods are classified by whether they are rivalrous, meaning one person’s use precludes another’s use of the good, and whether they are excludable, meaning it is feasible to prevent nonpayers from using the good. A good that is both rivalrous and excludable is a private good. Markets supply these just fine. When nobody can prevent others from enjoying a resource, nobody has an incentive to steward it. Nobody economizes on launches, and nobody bears the cost of the clutter they leave behind. The two goods relevant here are not private goods. Access to orbit, the ability to get a spacecraft from the pad to its intended trajectory, is nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. One party’s launch doesn’t prevent another’s, and it’s costly to prevent others from launching. That is a public good. Particular orbits are nonexcludable for similar reasons, but once a spacecraft occupies a given orbit, another cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In the crowded LEO shells, orbits are rivalrous. The combination of nonexcludability and rivalry makes orbits a common-pool resource. Nonexcludability is the bigger problem. When nobody can prevent others from enjoying a resource, nobody has an incentive to steward it. Nobody economizes on launches, and nobody bears the cost of the clutter they leave behind. The resulting “tragedy of the commons” is an instance of market failure: the privately beneficial strategy diverges from the socially optimal one. The standard economic remedy is a tax set equal to the harm imposed on others. Attractive in theory, corrective taxes run into two problems in practice. The first is a knowledge problem. Setting the tax right requires regulators to know the gap between the market as it is and the market in its perfectly efficient state, which is a heroic informational burden. The second is an incentive problem. Even assuming regulators had that knowledge, they may not have a reason to act on it efficiently. Public-sector actors are not angels. They respond to incentives, just like the rest of us. Regulators oftentimes have incentives not to solve the problems the public charges them with solving. After all, fixing things removes the justification for their jobs. They might even have an incentive to make things worse. And remember, unlike with markets, there’s no profit-and-loss discipline. Another way of thinking about common-pool resource problems is to take a property rights approach. Every disagreement about resource use ultimately hinges on property rights: who can do what with which resources. Once rights are clearly specified the parties can bargain their way to an efficient outcome. If “that which nobody owns, nobody will care for,” the obvious move is to assign ownership of launch trajectories and orbital slots. Here the property rights approach runs into trouble. How would a property right in an orbit be defined? A volume of space? How large, and moving at what speed? When the cost of defining and enforcing property rights exceeds the benefit, it is efficient for the rights not to exist. Orbital property rights seem like a case in point. That does not make the property rights paradigm irrelevant. A legal authority that decides who bears the burden of adjusting to orbital collision risks can promote efficiency even without creating property rights, because total costs fall when the burden lands on the party who can bear it most cheaply. Announcing who is responsible for debris is worthwhile even if nobody will ever hold a deed to an orbital slot. Could the private sector handle it alone? Suppose the law placed the burden of coping with debris entirely on private parties. That sounds irresponsible. But economists have a long list of public goods that were supposed to be impossible to supply privately and were supplied privately anyway. Lighthouses are a famous example. Hence private solutions are a reasonable baseline hypothetical. Debris is a problem only because it destroys useful spacecraft. There are two margins of response: uncluttering orbit and building more robust spacecraft. A clear rule dictating that operators eat the loss when their satellites are destroyed would push investment toward shielding and maneuverability. Importantly, insurance markets already exist to price the residual orbital risk. Yet even in an ideal institutional environment, a purely private response probably falls short. Shielding and insurance reduce the cost of collisions, but they don’t prevent them. Every collision adds debris, so the population grows on net. And the more probable collisions become, the less useful insurance is. Events that happen with high certainty are difficult to insure. The market’s recent trajectory illustrates the point. When I wrote, underwriters were collecting $750 million to $1 billion a year in premiums across roughly 50 insured launches, and coverage was a routine part of a satellite program. Claims approached $1 billion in 2023, major underwriters have exited the market, and as of last year only about 300 active satellites carried in-orbit coverage. Constellation operators have decided it’s cheaper to self-insure and replace. Because of a divergence of interests among the major spacefaring nations, the decision-making costs are exceptionally high: any major power can block a reform that doesn’t directly benefit it. Some roles for public authority seem warranted. End-of-life deorbit requirements are defensible. So, in principle, is a user fee on launches, subject to the knowledge problem and to capture by whichever incumbents reach the regulator first. However, geopolitical considerations tilt the scale against deliberately raising the costs of launch. I don’t foresee the United States or China hampering their own launch capabilities to address a global commons problem. Mitigation versus removal Everything so far concerns slowing the growth of debris. A complementary strategy is removing it. There are many intriguing engineering proposals to do this. But legal difficulties present many constraints. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty is the foundational document of public international space law. Article VIII, concerning ownership of launched objects, is the largest barrier to cleanup. A state retains jurisdiction and control over objects it launches, indefinitely. A dead Russian satellite is still Russia’s. An American firm cannot remove Chinese or Russian debris without permission, and permission will not be forthcoming. One reason is that debris is valuable. Most of the cost of putting mass into orbit is escaping Earth’s gravity well, so material already up there is positionally valuable. Spent upper stages alone contain roughly 1,000 metric tons of aluminum, which would cost on the order of $5 billion to $10 billion to launch from scratch. A new NIST report on an in-space circular economy puts the total recoverable mass near 10,000 metric tons. When a liability can become an asset, the owner holds out for the best terms possible. A second reason is that there is no legally binding international definition of debris, so a state can always insist that its dead satellite is a dormant asset. And the 1972 Liability Convention makes a launching state liable for damage its objects cause through fault in orbit. If an American company nudges a Russian hulk into a Chinese satellite, the United States is obliged to pay. That likely makes mission authorization harder to obtain, even assuming away regulatory uncertainty about whose permission you need. A comprehensive fix would require Washington, Moscow, and Beijing to overhaul the treaty. That, too, is a highly unlikely outcome. Because of a divergence of interests among the major spacefaring nations, the decision-making costs are exceptionally high: any major power can block a reform that doesn’t directly benefit it. Strategic bargaining would almost certainly spill over from celestial to terrestrial concerns. And ultimately, agreements among sovereigns must be self-enforcing. The best-sounding deal is rarely an incentive-compatible deal. Fortunately, the goal isn’t a pristine orbit. We just need to stay below the Kessler tipping point. On some estimates, removing five large objects a year for a century would stabilize low Earth orbit, given compliance with deorbit guidelines and no new major collisions. That modest target is reachable unilaterally within existing law. A spacefaring nation could simply announce that maritime salvage law applies to its own debris: any party under its jurisdiction that removes a piece of national junk keeps whatever value it recovers. The government could also contract for removal, as NASA contracts for cargo. But pricing a removal contract also has informational difficulties: too low a price and no supplier bids, too high a price and suppliers squander resources chasing it. One possible solution is to auction not the contract but the right to claim the debris. The market then prices the junk, and the public sector is relieved of the necessity of economic calculation, a responsibility that properly belongs to markets anyway. My paper’s conclusion was that the rules of the game come first. No actor, public or private, will invest in cleanup until the rules are clarified where ambiguous. In some cases we need to create new rules from scratch. Commons problems are routinely solved by institutions that are neither markets nor governments. Whatever institutions emerge must begin with actors interacting within the existing rules while simultaneously bargaining to change them. Looking ahead Rereading my paper, I realize its biggest limitation is implied by its title. My argument was never really about debris. It was about congestion. Debris was simply the first form of congestion anyone worried about, because in 2015 the dead objects vastly outnumbered the live ones. The ratio has collapsed. Get the rules right, and the orbital commons becomes a governed resource with accountable users and clearly allocated costs and benefits. Starlink satellites performed 207,152 collision-avoidance maneuvers in the six months from December through May. Already in 2023, about half of the close approaches Starlink faced involved other working satellites rather than debris, and this week SpaceX itself called other operators’ undisclosed maneuvers the biggest collision risk in low Earth orbit, ahead of debris. Looking ahead, China’s Guowang constellation is planned at 12,992 satellites and Thousand Sails at 15,000. Orbit is rivalrous whether it is filled by a live satellite or a dead one. The common-pool resource analysis applies to the whole orbital population. The de facto property regime for that population is the ITU’s first-come, first-served filing system, which rewards whoever fills a shell first. There’s a second important way my analysis was incomplete. I assumed states would be deterred from wrecking orbit by the reputational cost. Russia clearly wasn’t. The United States has now joined Russia and China in fielding counterspace weapons. The largest source of long-lived debris in the record is deliberate military action, and the most effective mitigation measure of the past decade was a unilateral American pledge not to repeat it, which most of the world then endorsed. But that promise seems less and less credible in our new era of great-power competition. Insofar as preserving orbital integrity is in the national interest, it must overlap with national security considerations. The White House’s own National Security Science and Technology Strategy endorses the ban on orbital weapons of mass destruction, and lists “capabilities for orbital debris remediation” as a national-security priority. Perhaps we can enlist defense contractors to help address congestion and debris, keeping in mind that many technologies that can remove orbital liabilities can also be repurposed to neutralize orbital assets. As a third point, the private sector has done more than I predicted on one margin and less on another. LeoLabs, Slingshot Aerospace, and ExoAnalytic have built businesses selling tracking data, which I doubted markets would adequately supply. But the insurance mechanism I emphasized has eroded. Operators have concluded it is cheaper to replace a satellite than to insure it, which is fine for the operator and bad for everyone sharing the shell. Thankfully, my chief takeaway stands: Get the rules right, and the orbital commons becomes a governed resource with accountable users and clearly allocated costs and benefits. Get them wrong, and the first orbital conflict may degrade the operating environment for generations. Alexander William Salter, an economics professor in the business school at Texas Tech University, has published space policy commentary in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, The Hill, SpaceNews, and several other outlets. He is the author of Space Economics: Production Possibilities for the Final Frontier.

Starship's Real Test Begins After Its Launch

starship launch Starship lists off September 28 on Flight 14, its first orbital mission. (credit: SpaceX) Starship’s real test may begin after launch by Inna Galinger Monday, October 12, 2026 On September 28, on its 14th flight, Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites. It’s one of the most impressive pieces of engineering I’ve seen in years. As moving people and cargo got cheaper and easier, a lot more businesses started to make sense. Starship could be a similar moment for space. The vehicle is designed to carry more than 100 tonnes to orbit. If SpaceX gets the reusability and flight cadence it’s aiming for, the industry will have a transportation system unlike anything it has had before. Still, what I keep thinking about isn’t the rocket, but what happens to the economy around it. The Boeing 707 lesson Aviation went through something similar. On October 26, 1958, Pan Am began regular Boeing 707 service between New York and Paris. The 707 wasn’t just a new airplane; jet aviation changed the economics of long-distance travel. Larger aircraft followed, and in 1978 the United States deregulated its airlines. Real fares fell by roughly 45%, and passenger numbers more than doubled. Here’s the part I find most interesting as an investor: much of the value created by cheaper air travel never went to the airlines. According to IATA, airlines earned about $979 billion in revenue in 2025 but only $36 billion in net profit, a 3.7% margin, or roughly $7 per passenger. Travel and tourism, meanwhile, contributed $11.6 trillion to the global economy, almost 10% of world GDP, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. Cheap flights made room for hotels and resorts, global logistics, mass tourism, and international business travel. None of those industries would have reached their current size without affordable air transport. Then came the Boeing 747. If the 707 made jet travel mainstream, the 747 showed how scale in transportation changes the economics around it. As moving people and cargo got cheaper and easier, a lot more businesses started to make sense. Starship could be a similar moment for space. Space has already had its 707 In a way, space has already been through the first stage. Falcon 9’s reusable first stage cut the cost of reaching orbit from about $54,500 per kilogram in the Space Shuttle era to about $2,700. That’s a big part of why constellations of thousands of satellites became possible, and why satellite communications look so different today. Starship goes further. It lowers the price, yes, but more importantly it changes how much you can deliver in a single flight. I suspect that difference will end up mattering more than the price per kilogram. When every kilogram is expensive, engineers shave off every gram they can. When you can put tens of tonnes, or over 100, into orbit at a fraction of today’s cost, that logic starts to break down. Systems don’t have to be as small or as intricate. Engineers can start thinking about larger, modular structures that can be serviced and upgraded. That isn’t just a change in launch economics; it changes how we design space infrastructure itself. What happens after launch? So which businesses actually benefit if launch gets much cheaper? A few come to mind: large constellations, defense systems, commercial stations, orbital computing, in-orbit servicing, and, further out, lunar infrastructure. I don’t want to turn this into another list of space markets, though, because all of them run into the same problem. Cheaper launch is only the first step. Starship may make some of these businesses physically possible without making them profitable. Each of them needs far more than a ride to orbit. A data center has to be powered and cooled; a station has to find paying customers; in-space manufacturing has to prove that microgravity actually makes a better product; a lunar base needs a whole supply chain, from power and communications to robotics and regular logistics. Getting there is becoming the easy part. Making it work once it’s there is not. Starship may make some of these businesses physically possible without making them profitable. Which raises a harder question for investors: if launch stops being the main constraint, what becomes the next one? Power, infrastructure, regulation, or plain old demand are all possibilities. My bet is that the next big layer of the space economy will form around whatever that constraint turns out to be, rather than around the rockets. The risk of too much success There’s a less obvious risk here. The space industry has been short of launch capacity for so long that it’s easy to assume more launches automatically mean more business, but they don’t. Infrastructure can grow faster than demand. If Starship really can put huge amounts of mass into orbit cheaply, companies will be able to build systems that never penciled out before. But being able to build something cheaply doesn’t mean anyone is waiting to buy it. The question may slowly shift from “What can we send to space?” to “What’s actually worth sending?” For a venture investor, that’s an important distinction. That’s why Starship’s potential impact shouldn’t be confused with a proven business model. The first issue is reusability. A fully reusable system flying at high cadence has yet to prove itself in real operations, and until it does, every forecast of future launch costs is a just a scenario. The second issue is that cost isn’t price. Even if SpaceX drives its cost per flight way down, there’s no guarantee customers will see prices fall by the same amount. The third issue is concentration. The company building the biggest new launch system is also a major satellite operator with its own infrastructure plans. For some future businesses, depending on your launch provider could mean depending on a competitor. None of this is an argument against Starship. If the capacity materializes, it could create markets that are hard to imagine today. But it does mean investors will have to look past the launch price. What happened after the Boeing 707 Neither the 707 nor the 747 created global tourism. What they did was make air travel accessible enough for a whole new economy to grow around it. Something similar could happen with Starship. The biggest value Starship creates may not come from selling rides, or even from how cheaply SpaceX can get a kilogram to orbit. It may come from companies that don’t exist yet, because under the old economics of access to space their business models simply couldn’t work. Starship has shown it can reach orbit. Now it has to do it again, and again, and again, cheaply enough to change not only the launch market but everything on the other side of it. That’s why I think Starship’s real test may begin after launch. Inna Galinger is chief operating officer at Beyond Earth Ventures, a deep-tech fund investing in breakthrough space and frontier technologies.

The ISS- What Happens When Humanity Loses Its Shared Home In Space?

ISS The International Space Station photographed from Space Shuttle Endeavour during STS-130 in February 2010. (credit: NASA; photo ID S130-E-006575.) After the ISS: What happens when humanity loses its shared home in space? by Alex Kennedy Monday, October 12, 2026 One day, probably sometime in the early 2030s, people will look toward a remote stretch of the Pacific and wait for something extraordinary to fall out of the sky. The International Space Station will be coming home. The more difficult question is what kind of human presence we are replacing it with—and whether, in gaining something new, we may quietly lose something we did not realize the ISS had given us. Not intact, of course. After decades in orbit, most of the largest object humanity has ever assembled in space will burn apart during a controlled reentry. Some pieces may survive long enough to reach an uninhabited part of the ocean. NASA and its partners have been planning that ending for years, including a dedicated vehicle intended to guide the station through its final descent. From an engineering perspective, it will be a disposal operation. I suspect it will feel more like a funeral. Not because the ISS is beautiful in any conventional sense. It is a collection of cylinders, radiators, solar arrays, cables, storage bags, laptops, and machines assembled over decades by countries that have often disagreed about almost everything else. But for more than a quarter of a century it has been a place where humanity lived away from Earth. That distinction matters. The question after the ISS is therefore larger than which spacecraft will replace it. We already have names for some of the possible successors, along with renderings, schedules, contracts, and business plans. The more difficult question is what kind of human presence we are replacing it with—and whether, in gaining something new, we may quietly lose something we did not realize the ISS had given us. The extraordinary thing that became ordinary On November 2, 2000, three people entered the International Space Station: William Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko, and Sergei Krikalev. Human beings have lived in space continuously ever since. NASA marked 25 years of uninterrupted occupation in November 2025. It is worth thinking about how strange that sentence actually is. There are adults alive today who were born into a world in which there has always been at least one human being living somewhere beyond Earth. And we barely notice. A crew launches. Another returns. Cargo arrives. An astronaut posts photographs of an aurora. A valve fails. Someone replaces it. Experiments are installed. A toilet breaks. A spacesuit is inspected. The station passes overhead again. Spaceflight has not become routine in the sense that it has become easy. It remains expensive, technically difficult, and unforgiving. But the ISS accomplished something subtler: it made living away from Earth feel normal. A footprint photographs better than a maintenance schedule, but civilization is built out of maintenance schedules. The history of the International Space Station is usually told through milestones: Zarya, Unity, the first expedition, laboratory modules, commercial cargo, Crew Dragon. Yet perhaps its most important milestone is the one without a date. At some point, we stopped being surprised that people lived there. Apollo showed that humans could reach another world, but the ISS showed that humans could stay away from this one. The difference is easy to miss because permanence is less dramatic than arrival. A footprint photographs better than a maintenance schedule, but civilization is built out of maintenance schedules. A machine for learning how fragile we are The ISS is often described as a laboratory. That is correct, but it is also incomplete. It has been a machine for discovering everything that goes wrong when an organism shaped by billions of years on Earth is removed from Earth. Our bones assume gravity exists. Our muscles assume they must work against it. Our cardiovascular system assumes there is a direction called down. Our balance system expects the inner ear to make sense. Our immune system, vision and cellular machinery evolved under conditions that spaceflight casually removes. Without countermeasures, long stays in microgravity can produce bone loss, muscle atrophy, fluid shifts, and changes across multiple physiological systems. Those problems become much more serious when the destination is not a station a few hours from Earth but the Moon or Mars. The question of how the human body may change during life on Mars begins with knowledge accumulated in places like the ISS. The encouraging part is that the station did not merely catalogue our vulnerabilities, but also became a place to work on them. Astronauts exercise for hours. Doctors collect data. Engineers change hardware. Researchers test how cells, tissues, and organisms respond when gravity is no longer the background condition of life. The same is true of the machinery that keeps those bodies alive. For a Mars mission, carrying every kilogram of water required by a crew from Earth would be absurdly expensive. Life-support systems have to behave increasingly like ecosystems: recovering what would otherwise be waste and turning it back into something useful. In 2023, NASA reported that the US segment of the station had demonstrated approximately 98% water recovery, a threshold relevant to future long-duration missions. That sounds like an engineering statistic because it is one. It is also a preview of the philosophy of settlement beyond Earth. On this planet we live inside a life-support system so large that most of us can pretend it does not exist. In orbit, nothing disappears. Air, water, heat, waste, and energy become visible parts of survival. A space station forces people to confront a truth Earth is good at hiding: survival depends on finite flows of matter and energy, whether we notice them or not. The ISS emerged from one historical moment and survived into another. The political world around it changed more radically than the basic logic of the station. Scientific output from the station is also easy to underestimate. The ISS National Laboratory reported a record 76 peer-reviewed publications in fiscal year 2025, bringing its cumulative publication count to nearly 630. A 2025 study in npj Microgravity examined research linked to the US National Laboratory and identified roughly 400 scholarly papers and 41 patents in its dataset. The authors found that the resulting intellectual products had unusually strong citation impact compared with matched terrestrial research. Not every experiment in orbit changed science. The deeper achievement was that humanity maintained a laboratory where some questions could be asked in a way they simply cannot be asked on Earth, and kept it alive long enough for researchers to build careers around those questions. ISS Earth fills the windows of the International Space Station's Cupola, a reminder that the orbital laboratory has also been a human home. (credit: NASA) The experiment of the ISS itself There is another experiment aboard the ISS that receives less attention because it does not fit inside a laboratory rack. It is the station itself. NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency did not merely contribute pieces to the same machine. They created systems that had to function together for decades. Different engineering cultures had to agree on interfaces. Different organizations had to share schedules, risk, electricity, communications, and responsibility for keeping people alive. An astronaut could not simply decide that geopolitics had become inconvenient and disconnect a module. The atmosphere still had to be controlled. Spacecraft still had to dock safely. The station still had to avoid debris. Crews still had to come home. That created a form of interdependence that is difficult to reproduce in speeches or treaties. It would be naive to romanticize it. Cooperation in orbit never erased competition on Earth, and the ISS did not abolish national interests. But it did create a place where cooperation was not a sentiment. It was an engineering requirement. A study published in the Journal of Peace Research examined international space cooperation from 1958 through 2023 and found that it has increasingly organized itself into distinct “space blocs” whose composition reflects geopolitical relationships on Earth. Those blocs, importantly, were not completely isolated from one another. That makes the ISS more interesting at the end of its life than it was at the beginning. It emerged from one historical moment and survived into another. The political world around it changed more radically than the basic logic of the station. This raises an uncomfortable possibility: what if the International Space Station was not the first example of how humanity will permanently organize itself in space, but instead the exception? ISS Eleven crew members aboard the International Space Station in April 2021, representing three overlapping crews and several national space agencies. (credit: NASA) After one station, many stations The future NASA is preparing for does not look like another ISS. The agency wants to become one customer among many purchasing services from commercially operated stations in low Earth orbit, rather than owning and operating the primary US orbital laboratory itself. This is not merely a rhetorical shift. NASA has been advancing the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations effort as the bridge between the ISS era and a market in which government research, private science, manufacturing, national astronaut programs, and perhaps tourism share orbital infrastructure. Europe is preparing for that world as well. In September 2026, ESA signed a letter of intent with Starlab exploring potential future European use of the station and a post-ISS memorandum with Axiom Space. Last week, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Vast, updating an agreement from 2024. There is a compelling logic behind this. Governments do not need to own every laboratory, ship, aircraft, or communications network they use. If companies can provide safe orbital infrastructure and find additional customers, NASA can purchase what it needs in low Earth orbit while spending more attention and money on destinations farther away. Commercialization could also produce something the ISS never could: diversity. Instead of one enormous multipurpose outpost, low Earth orbit might eventually contain several stations optimized for different roles. One could emphasize biomedical research, while another is devoted to manufacturing. Another could serve national astronaut programs or private missions. Some may combine all of those things. The ISS is effectively a single house. The next phase of human spaceflight may look more like a neighborhood. That could be progress. But neighborhoods work differently from houses. ISS A rendering of the completed Axiom Station, one of the commercial destinations being developed for the post-ISS era. (credit: Axiom Space) Who owns the room where humanity learns to live in space? This is the question I keep returning to. Not who legally owns a particular module, as lawyers can answer that. I mean something less precise: who owns the idea of human presence in space? The ISS was born when permanent life in space was uncertain. Its successors are being designed in a world where permanent orbital activity is increasingly treated as an assumption. The ISS was expensive, bureaucratic, and sometimes maddening precisely because it was built to satisfy many governments and institutions at once. Those weaknesses were real. Yet they were connected to one of its strengths: the station did not need to justify every cubic meter through the logic of a single commercial business case. Some research could be conducted because governments had decided that knowledge itself was worth funding. Some activities mattered because they trained astronauts. Others existed because they reduced risk for future missions. And some mattered because the partner nations considered continuous human presence in orbit to be strategically, scientifically or symbolically valuable. Commercial stations will not automatically abandon any of those things. NASA, ESA, and other agencies can pay for them. Nor is “commercial” a synonym for shallow or short-sighted. Private launch providers have already changed the economics of reaching orbit, and competition could make orbital research accessible to institutions that would never have found room aboard the ISS. Still, incentives matter. A laboratory treated as public infrastructure and a laboratory operated as a business may host many of the same experiments while answering different institutional questions. The ISS asked: What can we learn if nations collectively maintain a permanent laboratory in space? The coming era may ask: What happens when human presence in orbit becomes a service? Neither question is inherently better. But they are not the same question, and pretending they are would make it harder to notice what is actually changing. The day after the ISS There is a tendency to think of space exploration as a sequence of machines. Mercury led to Gemini. Gemini led to Apollo. The Space Shuttle helped build the ISS. The ISS will give way to commercial stations, Gateway, Artemis, and whatever follows. History rarely moves that neatly. Machines carry institutions with them. They create habits. They create professions. They teach people what is normal. The ISS taught mission controllers how to manage permanent operations in orbit. It taught astronauts how to repair a home while living inside it. It taught engineers which systems fail after years rather than weeks. It taught physicians what long-duration microgravity does to the body. It taught scientists how to design experiments for an environment unlike anything available on Earth. And, for a quarter century, it taught several nations how to share responsibility for keeping human beings alive in space. Perhaps that is the hardest experiment to reproduce. We will almost certainly build technically better stations. They may be cheaper, quieter, easier to maintain, and more comfortable. Their computers will be newer. Their life-support systems may recycle more. Their launch costs may be lower. Researchers may gain access to orbit without navigating the institutional machinery required by the ISS. In almost every technical sense, the descendants should eventually surpass their ancestor. Progress, however, does not guarantee continuity. The final crew will someday close the hatch. The station will be emptied. Its orbit will begin to fall under deliberate control. Then, after decades of carrying people around Earth every ninety minutes, the structure will meet the atmosphere it spent its entire existence avoiding. Most of it will disappear. That will not mean humanity has abandoned space. Quite the opposite. By then people may already be living aboard another station, flying around the Moon, or testing hardware meant for Mars. Continuous human presence beyond Earth may survive the transition. But something will still have ended. The ISS was born when permanent life in space was uncertain. Its successors are being designed in a world where permanent orbital activity is increasingly treated as an assumption. Perhaps that is the clearest definition of its legacy. It succeeded so completely at proving that humans could live beyond Earth that the argument moved on. We now debate customers, contracts, markets, national stations, commercial destinations, and who pays for which services instead of whether people can remain in orbit at all. That is an extraordinary transition. It is also a dangerous moment to confuse technical succession with cultural inheritance. The hardware cannot be preserved forever. The orbit cannot be occupied by the same structure forever. Even the institutions that created it will change. What can survive is the idea behind the station: that space can be more than territory to visit, exploit, or compete over. It can also be a place where people stay, learn and build things together. The real successor to the International Space Station may therefore not be another station. It may be the moment when humanity stops asking whether we belong beyond Earth and starts confronting the more difficult question: what kind of civilization do we intend to become once we get there? Alex Kennedy is the founder of Next Horizon, an independent publication covering space, science, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments wi

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