JSX Air describes itself as a “hop on jet service” that offers point-to-point flights to 17 destinations within Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, New York and Texas. The airline flies 23 Embraer ERJ-145 and ERJ-135 aircraft with 30 passenger seats. The company was founded as JetSuiteX in 2016. JetBlue and Qatar Airways are minority shareholders in the airline.
ESA Press Release
Our planet is surrounded by spacecraft carrying out important work to study our changing climate, deliver global communication and navigation services and help us answer important scientific questions.
But their orbits are churning with deadly fragments of the past – fast-moving pieces of defunct satellites and rockets trapped in orbit – that threaten our future in space.
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PARIS (ESA PR) — Europe experienced its warmest summer on record in 2021, accompanied by severe floods in western Europe and dry conditions in the Mediterranean. These are just some of the key findings from the Copernicus Climate Change Service’s European State of the Climate report released today. The in-depth report provides key insights and a comprehensive analysis of climate conditions in 2021, with a special focus on Europe and the Arctic.
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SILVER SPRING, Md. (NOAA PR) — NOAA plans to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) to explore the potential of acquiring commercial space-based weather data for a Commercial Weather Data Pilot (CWDP) study. The RFP will be posted to SAM.gov later this spring.
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HOUSTON (NASA PR) — At the conclusion of a weather briefing ahead of today’s planned undocking, NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX teams elected to wave off today’s undocking attempt due to a diurnal low wind trough which has been causing marginally high winds at the splashdown sites. The Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) crew is now targeting to undock from the International Space Station 8:55 p.m. EDT Sunday, April 24.
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HOUSTON (NASA PR) — NASA and SpaceX now are targeting no earlier than 3:52 a.m. EDT Wednesday, April 27, for launch of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-4 mission to the International Space Station from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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SILVER SPRING, Md. (NOAA PR) — NOAA plans to release three Broad Agency Announcements, or BAAs, that may lead to a review of advanced technologies for its future satellite and ground architecture, products and services.
The BAAs – and the studies that will result – are part of NOAA’s Office of System Architecture and Advanced Planning (OSAAP) Joint Venture Program. Joint Venture examines the feasibility of partnering with other federal agencies, the academic community, or the commercial sector to develop promising innovative research and technology to meet NOAA’s future observational, product and service needs.
Specifically, the BAAs will explore technologies for:
These emerging technologies are to be investigated for their value in enhancing a variety of NOAA’s systems including Numerical Weather Prediction and satellite ground processing. The BAAs are a critical first step in assessing possibilities for the future and not tied to a particular mission or end need.
The BAAs will be posted on the federal contracts opportunities website: SAM.gov. Following the release of the BAAs there will be a Community Day for all interested parties as announced in the BAA. Based on the responses to the BAAs, NOAA will choose the best options to pursue.
Virginia-based MaxIQ has made their first payment to bluShift Aerospace for suborbital launch services aboard their first full-scale commercial rocket
BRUNSWICK, Maine (bluShift Aerospace PR) – On Earth Day 2022 bluShift Aerospace, a Maine-based New Space startup, announced receipt of the first tranche towards its ongoing launch contract with Virginia-based Space STEM educator and space launch broker MaxIQ Space. The receipt constitutes the first tranche of payment for suborbital launch services aboard bluShift’s first full-scale commercial flight, Starless Rogue Beta.
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SOLNA, Sweden (SSC PR) — In the past few years, Swedish Space Corporation has made some quick developments within its ground segment activities. To celebrate SSC’s recent upgrades, the company now gather its capabilities and related services under one branded roof: SSC CONNECT®. The name reflects, among other things, the company’s strengthened capabilities such as the launch of the market’s first global Ka-band network for EO missions, multiple investments and upgrades of its ground stations and antenna capabilities, as well as the company’s leading position in Lunar connectivity.
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TOKYO (IHI Aerospace PR) — IHI Aerospace Co., Ltd (hereinafter ‘IA’) received order for launching the small SAR satellites owned by Institute for Q-Shu Pioneers of Space, Inc. (hereinafter ‘iQPS’). IA and iQPS signed the contract for launch service of QPS-SAR-3 and QPS-SAR-4 on April 18, 2022.
QPS-SAR-3 and QPS-SAR-4 are under manufacturing by iQPS with more than 25 partner companies in northern Kyushu and other parts of Japan. Two satellites will be launched by Epsilon flight #6 in Japanese FY 2022 from Uchinoura Space Center in Kyushu. This is first commercial launch order for IA.
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TOKYO (JAXA PR) — The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has examined the application documents submitted by 4,127 applicants for astronaut candidate recruitment, and as a result, the following document selection passers have been determined.
Number of successful applicants for document selection: 2,266
Breakdown
Breakdown of Astronaut Candidates by Age Group Who Passed Document Selection
| Age Group | Successful Applicants (Document Selection) | Total Applicants |
|---|---|---|
| 20s or younger | 483 (21.3%) | 811 (19.7%) |
| 30s | 1,084 (47.8%) | 1,850 (44.8%) |
| 40s | 513 (22.6%) | 973 (23.6%) |
| 50s | 163 (7.2%) | 424 (10.3%) |
| 60s and over | 23 (1.0%) | 69 (1.7%) |
| Total | 2,266 | 4,127 |
Future Plans
The 0th selection English test will be held on May 8th (Sunday), and only those who have passed the English test will be held a general liberal arts test on May 29th (Sunday). Both will be carried out online.
MSI’s “Lunar Insurance Plan” will cover ispace’s Mission 1 from launch to landing
TOKYO, April 21, 2022 (ispace PR) – Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Co., Ltd. (“MSI”), a subsidiary of MS&AD Insurance Group Holdings, Inc. based in Tokyo, Japan, and lunar exploration company, ispace, inc. (“ispace”), announced today that the two companies have reached an agreement for ispace to utilize MSI’s new lunar insurance to cover risks arising in the lunar business named the “Lunar Insurance Plan”. The companies recently signed the agreement in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which states the intention to finalize terms during 2022, in the months leading up to ispace’s first mission, Mission 1 (M1), which is currently planned to launch around Q4 2022* at the earliest.
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by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
Vowing that cooperation in space with the West will resume on Russia’s terms, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin said the space corporation is eyeing cooperation on China’s space station and begun efforts to replace the American Global Positioning System (GPS) in airplanes with Russian GLONASS satellite navigation system that is also capable of receiving navigation signals from China’s Beidou satellite constellation.
Rogozin also said Roscosmos plans to begin shipments of silo-based hypersonic Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in the fall amid continued tensions with the West over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The rocket was successfully test fired on Wednesday.
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SAN FRANCISCO (Planet Labs PR) — Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, today unveiled details about plans for Pelican, its next-generation satellite constellation, which was previously announced at Planet Explore 2021. Pelican is designed to rapidly capture changing events as they unfold and to provide a leap forward in capabilities for Planet customers – from higher revisit frequency and higher spatial resolution, to faster data access and delivery and real-time analytics. The program is under current development on-site at Planet’s in-house design and manufacturing facility.
“We are seeing strong and growing demand from multiple market segments for our high resolution products today. We have designed our next generation ‘Pelican’ fleet to meet the evolving needs of customers who want real-time information about global events as they unfold – from floods and wildfires to political conflicts and threats to human rights. Pelican’s rapid response and higher resolution will do exactly that,” said Planet’s Co-Founder and CEO Will Marshall.
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The effort will enable US customers to use the DIRSIG™ model with Rendered.ai’s cloud capabilities to generate Earth Observation datasets for AI training
BELLEVUE, Wash. and ROCHESTER, N.Y. (Rendered.ai PR) — Rendered.ai, the leading platform for physics-based synthetic data, and the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing (DIRS) Laboratory today announced a collaboration to combine the physics-driven accuracy of the DIRSIG synthetic imagery model with Rendered.ai’s cloud-based platform for high volume synthetic data generation.
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms using Computer Vision (CV) data provide a key tool for exploiting the rapidly expanding capability and content of Earth Observations (EO) collection and analytics companies around the world. Rendered.ai provides a platform as a service (PaaS) for data scientists and CV engineers to scalably produce large, configurable synthetic CV datasets in the cloud for training Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ML systems.
The DIRSIG model produces a range of simulated output representing passive single-band, multi-spectral, or hyper-spectral imagery from the visible through the thermal infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. DIRSIG is widely used to test algorithms and to train analysts on simulated standard imagery products. The Rendered.ai team has built simulators for visible light and synthetic aperture radar (SAR), however DIRSIG’s breadth of capability and ongoing investment by granting agencies will provide qualified Rendered.ai customers a much wider range of field-tested and production-quality sensor modeling technology.
“DIRSIG has been providing synthetic imagery to expert customers for decades,” said Scott Brown, Ph.D., principal scientist and project lead. “Our collaboration with Rendered.ai enables us to bring our proven capability to a wider audience at a time when satellite and other forms of remote sensing data collection are rapidly expanding.”
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