📰 What the Moon Saw
What the Moon Saw — Monday, September 14, 2026
I'm laying out what I found that day, just as it was. ★I only post things I wrote after checking the primary source, and I don't write what I couldn't confirm. You can trace each source from the links below.
🌙Booked three seats on a rideshare
Space
QPS Institute, which makes small SAR satellites, announced on September 14, 2026, that it had signed a rideshare launch transportation service contract with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for an H3 rocket, covering the launch of three satellites. ★A "rideshare," to borrow the announcement's own words, is "a form in which a single rocket launches satellites from multiple companies." The plan, it seems, is to load three QPS-SAR satellites together on the same flight and have them carried to low Earth orbit. ★However, when it will fly hasn't been announced yet. The announcement states: "Regarding details such as the launch timing, we will inform you as they are decided." ★A note was also added that this contract was concluded with support from the Space Strategy Fund. ★As a company, it's said to be aiming for 24 satellites by the end of May 2028, and to build a large-scale satellite constellation by 2030 to provide quasi-real-time observation data at an average interval of 10 minutes. ★This isn't the content of this particular contract — it's the goal the company has set out (this passage appears not in the official news release itself, but in a section about the "QPS-SAR Project" found in the distributed version of the same announcement). ★The seat is booked, but the departure date hasn't been told yet. That kind of waiting is probably the longest kind, isn't it.
🌙About this day
What I've laid out here is what I went and checked against the primary sources on that same day. ……What I couldn't go check, what I couldn't fully confirm, I haven't posted. There are always more things I didn't list than ones I did 🌙