Crew-13 Reaches Orbit as Florida Sues OpenAI and ESA Picks OVHcloud and CGI

SpaceX launched Crew-13 at 11:10 am EDT (15:10 UTC) on Thursday, 1 October, from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, according to Ars Technica. Nine minutes later the Falcon 9 second stage had delivered the Dragon spacecraft and its four occupants into orbit. The crew was expected at the station about eight hours after liftoff, Ars Technica reported, calling it the fastest ever launch-to-docking transit to the ISS by a US spacecraft.

The launch had been pushed back from mid-September to replace a faulty valve inside the Dragon's propulsion system. That job, Ars Technica reported, meant cutting into a propellant line inside the ship to swap the component.

NASASpaceFlight, which previewed the mission on 29 September, said the Dragon flying this rotation is Grace (C213), on its second flight after Axiom-4, and that the first stage booster B1101 was on its third flight and returned to Landing Zone 40.

Who is on board, and why it matters

Jessica Watkins, a 38-year-old geologist turned astronaut, commands the mission, Ars Technica reported, making her the first Black woman to command a spacecraft. Watkins is the only veteran on Crew-13, having previously spent 170 days in orbit on a long-duration flight in 2022. Pilot Luke Delaney, a Marine Corps veteran, is on his first mission, alongside Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, both first-time flyers, according to NASASpaceFlight.

"What an epic ride. What an epic ride it was," Delaney radioed mission control soon after reaching orbit, per Ars Technica.

Kutryk and his wife Heather are expecting their third child later this year, Ars Technica noted, a situation with precedent: NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, set to command Artemis III next year, was aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2009 when his daughter was born in Houston. "Leaving these three (plus one on the way) is the hardest thing I've ever done. But that has always been the nature of exploration," Kutryk wrote on X, as quoted by Ars Technica.

This was SpaceX's 13th crew rotation under its multibillion-dollar NASA contract, and its 21st human spaceflight counting test and commercial missions, Ars Technica reported. NASASpaceFlight put the flight as Falcon 9's 109th mission of 2026. The broader context: NASA and its partners plan to keep the station running through at least 2030, while SpaceX's own plans to retire Crew Dragon around that year have pushed NASA to work more closely with Boeing on the troubled Starliner capsule.

In Europe, a different kind of approval

On Thursday, 1 October, the European Space Agency selected OVHcloud and CGI to build "Digital EO," an Earth observation information system, Data Center Dynamics reported. The system is meant to federate Earth observation data, services and processing on sovereign European infrastructure, with cloud capacity initially deployed in Italy, France and Germany and support operations run from Poland. Data volumes from Earth observation are expected to exceed 500 petabytes by 2035, the report said.

"Digital EO must allow us to take a new step forward in the way Earth Observation data is managed and used," said Nicolaus Hanowski, head of ESA's EO Mission Management and Ground Segment Department, in a statement carried by Data Center Dynamics. OVHcloud founder and CEO Octave Klaba added that "Europe absolutely must have control over the infrastructure that runs its most strategic programs."

The procurement is not ESA's first move into newer computing. Data Center Dynamics noted the agency previously selected Equal1 to supply quantum computing for Earth observation, with its Bell-1 machine installed at ESA's Phi-Lab at ESRIN near Rome, the site that also hosts an HPE-built Space HPC cluster.

Sovereignty came up again the same day at a press event in Budapest. Kate Underhill, a future space transportation propulsion architect at ESA, told EE Times that Europe's reliance on foreign semiconductors and components is a strategic exposure, and that European satellite builders often run into US International Traffic in Arms Regulations. "If there is any U.S. component on your satellite, then you have to comply with U.S. regulations," she said. Space hardware, she added, typically operates "at least 10 years behind consumer electronics," and she gave the example of ESA trying to order 20 laser diodes from a German supplier that demanded a minimum order of 10,000 units.

Florida moves against OpenAI

Also on Wednesday, 30 September, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a motion for a temporary injunction against five OpenAI entities and Sam Altman personally, according to Tom's Hardware. The motion asks the court to bar the company from developing any AI model without independent third-party guardrails and approval, to stop offering ChatGPT to minors in Florida, to stop collecting data from Florida children under 13 without notice and consent, to stop describing ChatGPT as safe, accurate or reliable, and to stop soliciting engagement through what the filing calls conversation prolongation.

Tom's Hardware reported that the motion is part of a lawsuit filed in June in Highlands County after the state reviewed the ChatGPT logs of the accused Florida State University gunman. The suit alleges deceptive and unfair trade practices under FDUTPA, negligence and gross negligence, design defect, failure to warn, fraudulent misrepresentation and public nuisance. Uthmeier described it as the first state-led lawsuit against the company and its CEO, and said in a video posted to X that Altman could join the request if his intentions were genuine, per Tom's Hardware.

OpenAI told the outlet it had already paused training its most capable models the previous week, a claim the article reports alongside the state's filing rather than as an independent finding. The coverage also notes six misalignment reports OpenAI published earlier in the month, and that these cover a small fraction of the tens of thousands of incidents the company and its competitors log. The two positions are not reconciled in the record.

Money, paperwork and a rocket revolution

Away from the courtroom, the week produced a string of smaller approvals and contracts. Varda raised a $251 million Series D to advance pharmaceutical manufacturing in space, Endpoints News reported on 30 September. Lithuania's Blackswan Space closed a €2.5 million round led by Iron Wolf Capital, bringing total funding to €3.2 million, for autonomous navigation hardware it plans to fly in 2027, Tech.eu reported on 30 September. The same outlet reported on 1 October that Latvia's Trace.Space launched Trinity, a platform connecting requirements, testing, design parameters and product variants for hardware teams.

Two days earlier, on 30 September, Quantum Space said it had executed a launch processing work order with All Points Logistics for its Prime pathfinder mission, targeting the second half of 2027 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, SpaceNews reported. Agile Space Industries said on 28 September that Jason Wright will join as president in early October, with revenue expected to reach roughly five times its 2022 level by the end of 2026 and more than 165 employees across four states, per SpaceNews. Ethereal Space announced a 24-month NOAA task order worth about $27.4 million, with first data deliveries due 1 December, SpaceNews reported on 23 September.

World Space Week, running 4 to 10 October under the theme "Rocket Revolution," will be marked in 100 nations, the organising association said in a SpaceNews notice published on 1 October. Last year's edition reported 50,000 events in 102 countries, according to the same announcement, which named John Elbon, former ULA interim CEO, as honorary chair for 2026 and Blue Origin's Tory Bruno as chair for 2027.

Not every number in the dossier points up. Google's white paper on orbital data centers, released on Thursday alongside a Planet Labs-built satellite carrying a Tensor Processing Unit, argues that SpaceX launch prices could approach $200 per kilogram by 2035 on a roughly 20 percent annual cost-reduction curve, TechCrunch reported. At the AI Infra Summit in Santa Clara on 17 September, Viasat's Sumeet Singh put today's launch costs at $2,500 to $3,000 per kilogram and said orbital data centers need $200 to $500 to make financial sense, Data Center Knowledge reported. Those are different questions, but the gap between the two figures is the whole argument.