PLD Space and CNES study second Guiana pad, Russia's crewed capsule slips to 2028

On Thursday, PLD Space said it had entered an agreement with CNES, the French space agency, to examine whether a second launch pad can be accommodated at the ELM-Diamant site of the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, according to The Next Web. The pad would support the MIURA 5 and the larger MIURA 9, and would sit inside a former Diamant rocket site that CNES is converting into a shared base for several private launch companies.

Both rockets fall under PLD Space's agreement with the European Space Agency under the European Launcher Challenge, an initiative intended to reduce Europe's dependence on overseas rockets. ESA entered into the contract in August; it is worth €158.9m and is mainly financed by Spain, with a contribution from Germany.

PLD Space already has a presence at the site. In June 2025, it became the first private company to enter into a contract with CNES to construct its own launch complex there, and the MIURA 5 will make its first flight from that complex. The company states that its first flight will occur in 2026; its only launch to date was MIURA 1 in October 2023.

"This agreement with CNES reinforces PLD Space's long-term commitment to the Guiana Space Centre and to Europe's autonomous access to space," said Ezequiel Sánchez, PLD Space's executive president, in comments carried by The Next Web.

What the new agreement does and does not commit to

The wording matters. The two sides will study whether the new pad can be accommodated at ELM-Diamant, not build it. No cost, schedule or capacity figures were disclosed in the announcement, and the dossier gives no date for a decision. The only hard figure attached to the European Launcher Challenge work is the €158.9m ESA contract signed in August, which is mainly funded by Spain with a German contribution.

That is a smaller sum than the headline numbers that have circulated around European launch programmes, and it is spread across an effort that has not yet flown a MIURA 5. PLD Space's own timeline puts that first flight in 2026, which leaves a narrow window given the company's only orbital attempt so far was the suborbital MIURA 1 in October 2023.

Russia's crewed capsule keeps its name and its delays

The Russian story is older and messier. Ars Technica reported on 30 September that the relatively new chief executive of Roscosmos, Dmitry Bakanov, appears to have dropped the "Eagle" name for the spacecraft favoured by his predecessor Dmitry Rogozin, and that a recently published Interfax story refers to it as PTK NP.

Bakanov told the publication that tests of the spacecraft's parachute system will begin this fall. "The first step is the launch and testing of a new, promising, reusable manned transport spacecraft," he said. "And in the fall, there will be a parachute drop and testing in the Far East."

According to Interfax, the spacecraft will also undergo tests in emergency rescue modes during an emergency at the launch pad later this year, and in 2027 tests will occur in the zone of maximum dynamic pressures. Ars Technica notes it is not clear from the report whether these tests will involve real flight hardware, boilerplate vehicles, or mockups, though the reference to maximum dynamic pressure presumably points to Max-Q and suggests some kind of launch abort test.

The article says Russian space officials are holding to a debut crewed launch in 2028 or 2029, likely on the Angara A5M rocket. Ars Technica is blunt that this is probably not a date to write down in ink: four years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke confidently about the Eagle spacecraft and the resumption of Russia's lunar programme.

The project has gone through several names since 2009, from PPTS to PTK NP to Federatsiya to Orel, and Ars Technica describes it as having always seemed more of a Potemkin village than an effort encompassing real hardware. Whatever it is eventually called, the spacecraft is intended to supplant Soyuz for flying cosmonauts into low Earth orbit and to have the versatility to fly humans to the Moon.

Lithuania's Blackswan raises for autonomous navigation

On the commercial side, Lithuania's Blackswan Space closed its second investment round, led by Iron Wolf Capital, raising €2.5m, Tech.eu reported on 30 September. Together with its pre-seed round, total funding now amounts to €3.2m. Other investors included Lemonade Stand and former NanoAvionics co-founder Linas Sargautis, both previous backers, as well as NGL Ventures and Tomas Žalandauskas.

Founded in 2019, Blackswan has been developing its Mission Design Simulator software for autonomous missions and its RPO Kit, a plug-and-play payload designed to perform rendezvous and proximity operations using vision-based target detection, identification and tracking. The company has grown from two technical experts into a team of 25 people across Vilnius, London and Denver.

As the next milestone, Blackswan will test its RPO Kit in orbit next year, with the launch scheduled for Q4 2027. That will be followed by the first European in-space refuelling mission, ASTRAL, planned for 2028, which is backed by up to €3.3m in funding from the UK Space Agency and ESA.

Jake Geer, managing director of Orbit Fab UK, said: "This team has proven themselves to be highly capable and driven from the very beginning. That and their strong relationship with ESA is why we selected Blackswan to provide one of the most critical components, the RPO Kit, for our upcoming first European refuelling demonstration mission ASTRAL, flying in 2028."

Viktoras Jucikas, founding partner at Iron Wolf Capital, framed the bet in terms of European dependence. "A satellite in orbit today is blind and deaf without the ground," he said. "It cannot tell what has parked next to it, cannot avoid a collision on its own, and cannot be easily repaired or refuelled. Blackswan Space is working to change that."

Varda raises $251m for medicines in space

Endpoints News reported on 30 September that a California startup, Varda, has raised a $251m Series D to advance pharmaceutical manufacturing in space. The report describes the field as long seen as a next area for drug production, and the funding lands as the sector continues to attract capital despite a mixed broader biotech market.

The dossier does not include Varda's investor list, its valuation, or specific programme timelines, and the Endpoints piece is partially paywalled, so those details cannot be confirmed here. What is clear from the headline and the visible text is the size of the round and the company's stated focus: making medicines in orbit.

Software, not hardware, is the other bottleneck

Two smaller items round out the week. On 1 October, Tech.eu reported that Latvian startup Trace.Space launched Trinity, a hardware engineering platform aimed at robotics, aerospace, automotive, defence and other teams moving from prototypes to products manufactured at scale. Trinity connects requirements, testing, design parameters and product variants in one system while giving AI agents access to that engineering data.

Trace.Space was founded in 2022 in Riga and has offices locally and in the US. The company estimates Trinity currently covers around 40 per cent of the product development lifecycle, up from roughly 10 per cent when it started, and aims to manage as much as 80 per cent over time. Co-founder Janis Vavere said: "So even though it might not seem obvious at the beginning, requirements are where it all starts and where the core of the IP is held."

Separately, Vespper published a launch post on 28 September for a DOCX MCP tool it claims is 3× faster, 2× cheaper and more accurate for agents editing Word documents. The company argues that agents waste context on Word mechanics, and that a lossless round-trip approach borrowed from infrastructure-as-code is the fix. The claim is a vendor's own benchmark, not an independent test, and Vespper names Harvey among the companies that have run into the same class of problem.

What to watch

The week's freshest item is the PLD Space and CNES study, dated 1 October. It is a feasibility agreement, and feasibility agreements in European launch have a habit of outlasting the rockets they describe. The Russian spacecraft tests promised for this fall and the Max-Q work pencilled in for 2027 will be the first real evidence that PTK NP is hardware rather than renderings. Blackswan's Q4 2027 launch and ASTRAL in 2028 give Europe two dated milestones for autonomous operations. Varda's $251m is the largest single number in the dossier, and also the one with the least detail attached.