Roscosmos revives PTK NP as space startups raise $251M and plan AI autonomy

That is the newest hard fact in a week that also brought a $251 million Series D for in-space pharmaceutical manufacturing, a pledge to fly a fully AI-autonomous spacecraft in 2027, and a $500 million naming gift to Carnegie Mellon's computer science school.

Ars Technica's Eric Berger reported on 30 September that Bakanov, who took over Roscosmos after Dmitry Rogozin, has dropped the "Eagle" branding Rogozin adopted in September 2019. Interfax now calls the vehicle PTK NP, the technical designation used until 2016. Bakanov told the outlet that the first step is "the launch and testing of a new, promising, reusable manned transport spacecraft." Parachute drops and testing in the Far East follow this fall, emergency rescue mode tests at the launch pad come later this year, and tests "in the zone of maximum dynamic pressures" are set for 2027. Berger notes it is unclear whether real flight hardware, boilerplate vehicles or mockups will be used, and that the reference to maximum dynamic pressure suggests some form of launch abort test. Russian officials are holding to a first crewed launch in 2028 or 2029, likely on the Angara A5M rocket, a date Berger advises against writing down in ink.

The project has been renamed repeatedly: PPTS in 2009, PTK NP until 2016, Federatsiya from January 2016, and Orel from September 2019. Europe and Russia discussed a joint next-generation crewed spacecraft two decades ago, with Europe to supply a service module for a capsule carrying up to six passengers. Europe walked away and Roscosmos continued alone.

Money moves toward orbit, and toward Earth-bound labs

On the same day, Endpoints News reported that Varda, a California startup, raised a $251 million Series D to advance pharmaceutical manufacturing in space, an area the outlet describes as long seen as the next step for drug production. The report, published 30 September at 15:35 UTC, carries no disclosed investors and no named lead backer in the text available, and Varda has not put a launch date on the manufacturing effort in that account.

Separately, SpaceNews reported on 30 September that space mining company AstroForge plans to fly a spacecraft next year that will test its ability to operate fully autonomously using artificial intelligence. Jeff Foust's story, datelined Washington, describes a full autonomy demonstration rather than a partial one, though the piece does not name the mission, the launch vehicle or a specific launch window.

Carnegie Mellon University announced on 30 September that Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin gave $500 million, renaming its School of Computer Science the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science. The university said the gift is part of a $1 billion Pittsburgh investment and a broader $3 billion commitment it calls the largest in higher education history, including a new campus in Miami. CMU said the money will fund GPUs, servers, storage and networking for researchers, and quotes president Farnam Jahanian and dean Martial Hebert. The university ranks No. 1 in the country for graduate programs in AI, programming languages and systems, according to U.S. News & World Report.

"We have never been a place that waits for the future to arrive. We built our reputation by creating it," Hebert said in the CMU release.

Two of this week's items are not space stories at all. A Quote Investigator post published 30 September traces the line "computer science is not about computers, any more than astronomy is about telescopes," finding an anonymous 1986 appearance in George Johnson's "Machinery of the Mind," a 1971 astronomy analogy from Anthony Ralston, a 1974 critique by W. N. Holmes, a 1982 Donald Knuth interview and a 1989 attribution by Jacques Arsac to Alan Perlis in 1968. A technical post on the Deferworks blog published 30 September opens a six-part series on join ordering in query optimization, citing four papers from the Munich school, starting with Moerkotte and Neumann's VLDB 2006 work on DPccp and running to Birler and Neumann's DBPL 2025 paper on complete join search space enumeration. A GitHub repository, Helheim, also surfaced on 30 September, offering an Emacs configuration framework built around a Helix emulation layer.

Read together, the week says more about funding and software ambitions than about flight-proven hardware. Varda's raise and AstroForge's plan are both forward-looking. Russia's test schedule is the only item with a date attached to physical hardware, and its own history argues for scepticism.