NorthStar CTO, Starship Orbits, Starliner Slips to 2028

NorthStar Earth & Space Promotes Peter Klimas to Chief Technology Officer

Montreal-based NorthStar Earth & Space promoted Peter Klimas to chief technology officer, effective Sept. 24. Klimas moves up from Executive Director of Engineering at the company, which catalogues objects in orbit and provides space intelligence and data analytics for defence and civil customers.

His customers include Canada’s 3 Canadian Space Division, the U.S. Space Force and the European Space Agency. As CTO, Klimas will oversee how the company’s satellite sensors, ground systems, data processing and orbital planning fit together, with a mandate to improve coverage, shorten revisit times and close observation gaps across its tracking network.

Klimas reached his previous post after working through Technical Director and Senior Director of Systems Engineering roles at NorthStar. Before joining the company, he held senior engineering roles in aerospace and optical communications, including work on the James Webb Space Telescope.

“As CTO, my priority will be to help our teams translate their expertise into a clear and coordinated technology roadmap,” Klimas said in the announcement. “Together, we will make our system architecture more adaptable, scalable, and resilient while focusing our innovation on the capabilities that improve mission value for our customers.”

NorthStar recently turned to Kepler Communications for its next hosting payloads, agreeing to fly sensors on Kepler’s satellites rather than build dedicated spacecraft of its own. Neither company has disclosed the deal’s value or a launch timeline for the first Kepler-hosted sensor.

Starship Reaches Orbit for the First Time on Flight 14

SpaceX flew a Starship into orbit for the first time on Monday, Sept. 28, after an engine anomaly forced a 20-minute hold during the mission. Ship 41, flying for the first time, released 26 Starlink version 3 satellites — the first time SpaceX has added operational satellites to the network from Starship.

Super Heavy Booster 21, also on its first flight, lit all 33 engines at liftoff and separated from Ship 41 in a hot-staging manoeuvre a little over two minutes later. The booster splashed down softly off Starbase in the Gulf of Mexico.

During the ascent burn, one of Ship 41’s six Raptor engines shut down early. SpaceX had stated all week it would only commit to orbit if every system checked out, so flight controllers held the ship in its suborbital holding pattern for about 20 minutes while they checked the three sea-level engines it would need both to reach orbit and to return.

“We’ve got the saying, only the paranoid survive,” SpaceX’s Dan Hewitt told the broadcast before liftoff. “That’s going to be in full effect today.”

Once the review was complete, Hewitt delivered the go-for-orbit call. Ship 41 lit a single engine fed from tanks in its nose cone — a burn Starship had never attempted — and reached orbit roughly 275 kilometres up.

Ship 41 began releasing Starlink satellites about 34 minutes after liftoff, deploying all 26 over the next half hour. Each satellite adds roughly a terabit per second of capacity to the network. One full Starship load moves about as much bandwidth as 10 Falcon 9 launches of the older satellite version, SpaceX said.

A July Starship flight had test-deployed 20 of the same satellites without adding them to the network. Monday’s 26 should start serving customers within a few weeks, the company said.

Flight documentation filed before launch indicated controllers could end the mission after as few as two orbits. Ship 41 splashed down in the Pacific north of Hawaii about three hours after liftoff, completing roughly two orbits instead of the six SpaceX had publicly described.

Boeing Starliner Crewed Flights Slip to 2028

Boeing and NASA announced Monday that the next crewed Starliner flight will not happen until 2028, two years after the spacecraft landed in the New Mexico desert without NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. An uncrewed test flight is expected no sooner than the end of this year, with another year or more needed to evaluate those results before putting astronauts back aboard.

NASA plans unpiloted Starliner test flight at end of year September 29, 2026 William Harwood Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen in the company’s Kennedy Space Center hangar in July. Image: Boeing… | Source: Spaceflight Now

The message from the NASA-Boeing news conference at Kennedy Space Center was clear: both organizations remain committed to Starliner despite persistent problems since the program’s first test flight in 2019. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Low Earth Orbit Program Manager Dana Weigel, NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg and Boeing Vice President and Commercial Crew Program Manager John Mulholland participated in the briefing.

NASA awarded fixed-price contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to restore American crew transportation to the International Space Station. From the Space Shuttle’s retirement in 2011 until SpaceX’s Crew Dragon first flight in 2020, NASA paid Russia for crew transportation at a price that ultimately reached $90 million per seat.

NASA wanted two commercial crew providers for redundancy and competition. That remains the goal, but SpaceX is currently the only operational provider. SpaceX’s Crew-13 mission is scheduled to launch on Oct. 1.

Citations

“NorthStar promotes Peter Klimas to chief technology officer” — https://spaceq.ca/northstar-promotes-peter-klimas-to-chief-technology-officer/
“SpaceX’s Starship Flight 14 reaches orbit, delivers Starlink satellites” — https://spaceq.ca/starship-flight-14-reaches-orbit-starlink-satellites/
“Next Crewed Boeing Starliner Flight Not Until 2028” — https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/next-crewed-boeing-starliner-flight-not-until-2028/
“NASA plans unpiloted Starliner test flight at end of year” — https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/09/29/nasa-plans-unpiloted-starliner-test-flight-at-end-of-year/
“Advanced Health Research Begins Week as Station Awaits Crew-13 Mission” — https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2026/09/28/advanced-health-research-begins-week-as-station-awaits-crew-13-mission/

Crew-13

Provider: SpaceX
Date: October 1, 2026
Time: 3:10 PM UTC
Vehicle: Falcon 9

SpaceX Crew-13 is the thirteenth crewed operational flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

Transporter 18 (Dedicated SSO Rideshare)

Provider: SpaceX
Date: October 1, 2026
Time: 6:18 PM UTC
Vehicle: Falcon 9

Dedicated rideshare flight to a sun-synchronous orbit with dozens of small microsatellites and nanosatellites for commercial and government customers.

NROL-97

Provider: SpaceX
Date: October 2, 2026
Time: 3:53 AM UTC
Vehicle: Falcon Heavy

Classified payload for the US National Reconnaissance Office.

Flight 2

Provider: HyImpulse
Date: October 5, 2026
Time: 12:00 AM UTC
Vehicle: SR75

Test flight of HyImpulse’s SR75 sounding rocket.

SDA Tranche 1 Transport Layer A

Provider: SpaceX
Date: October 5, 2026
Time: 8:06 AM UTC
Vehicle: Falcon 9

Tranche 1 Transport Layer A is one of six missions by the United States Space Force Space Development Agency (SDA) for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) Tranche 1 Transport Layer constellation, which will provide assured, resilient, low-latency military data and connectivity worldwide to the full range of warfighter platforms from Low Earth Orbit satellites.

The constellation will be interconnected with Optical Inter-Satellite Links (OISLs) which have significantly increased performance over existing radio frequency crosslinks. It is expected to operate over Ka band, have stereo coverage and be dynamically networked for simpler hand-offs, greater bandwidth and fault tolerance.

This launch carries 21 satellites manufactured by Northrop Grumman.