02/06/2026
Issue 008 Part II of EWC Space Delta-V is live — the industry and engineering roundup of a remarkable week.
On May 28, Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket exploded on its Cape Canaveral launch pad during a static fire test — six days after the FAA had cleared it to fly again following the NG-3 upper stage anomaly. Two concurrent mishap investigations are now open. The Amazon Kuiper launch schedule faces new uncertainty.
These types of Space Engineering incidents often result in insightful engineering inquiries and new learnings that spread through the entire Space Engineering ecosystem. The upfront costs are high, the delays and scrutiny are significant — but the knowledge gained is invaluable and invariably accelerates what comes next.
→ SmallSat Europe 2026 ran May 26–28 in Amsterdam. 180 exhibitors. 2,000+ professionals. The honest verdict on the European smallsat industrial base: "Europe does not lack ideas. It lacks scale."
→ Scanway, a Polish optical payload company from Wrocław, presented "Polish Optical Payloads Going Global" — and has signed a lunar mineralogy contract with Intuitive Machines. A team of 60 engineers, TRL 9 products, a Moon mission. Europe's supply chain is being built one company at a time.
→ The photonics section covers SHERLOC's deep-UV Raman laser, the instrument that found the potential Mars biosignature — and why the optical instrument is the primary science instrument of the current era of space exploration.
Also published today: the Technical Deep-Dive on imec's radiation-hardened 4×56 Gbps optical backplane chip for satellites — the ESA ProtoBIX programme result that makes the satellite optical interconnect transition real.
Blue Origin's Catastrophic Week, Europe Asks the Hard Question, and the Optical Instruments Doing the Real Work
Read Part II here:
Co-written by Nuno Edgar Nunes Fernandes, 2nd June 2026
