Taking on Challenges in New Areas while Leveraging Its Core Technologies

TOKYO, September 30, 2021 (Honda Motor Co. PR) — Honda Motor Co., Ltd. today introduced the technology development direction the company is currently pursuing for the challenges Honda is taking on in new areas while leveraging its core technologies. This direction leads to the fulfillment of Honda’s 2030 Vision of serving people worldwide with the “joy of expanding their life’s potential.”

These new areas include a new challenge in the field of outer space, an electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, and an avatar robot with a goal to expand the range of human ability.

Boston (Tomorrow.io PR) – ​Tomorrow.io, the world’s fastest growing weather intelligence and climate security company, today announced strategic partnerships with Astro Digital and Muon Space in the development of Tomorrow.io’s first-of-its-kind, proprietary radar-equipped weather satellites.

MEXICO CITY (Argentina National Commission for Space Activities PR) — Within the framework of the VI Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), held in Mexico City, last Saturday, September 18, 2021, Argentina signed the Constitutive Agreement of the Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency (ALCE), as an international organization in charge of coordinating cooperation activities in the space field of Latin American and Caribbean countries, for the use and peaceful exploration of outer space, the Moon and other celestial bodies.

This initiative was achieved after the Declaration on the Constitution of a Regional Cooperation Mechanism in the space field was signed in October 2020, with the participation of seven countries in the region: Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Honduras and Costa Rica. Going forward, the FTAE will be open to all States in the region that ratify the Convention .

Fresh off the success of the Hope Mars orbiter, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric Science and Physics (LASP) will team again on an ambitious mission to explore Venus and seven asteroids.

Former Orbital Insight Vice President joins geospatial intelligence leader to expand company’s presence across US Government entities

GAITHERSBURG, Md., October 5, 2021 — Edgybees, the leading visual intelligence technology company, announced today the appointment of Craig Brower as President of US Government operations. Brower will lead Edgybees’ sales, engineering, operations, marketing, and strategic business development initiatives across the United States. Brower joins Edgybees shortly following strategic advisory board appointments from the company as it looks to secure and strengthen its position within the US government sector.  

Brower is the former Vice President and General Manager, Public Sector at Orbital Insight, a leading company in the geospatial data analytics sector. Prior to his role at Orbital Insight, Brower served as Vice President of Vricon, a geospatial-intelligence data and software provider and Senior Director of Business Development at the leading aerospace company, BAE Systems. Brower has over 30 years’ experience in the intelligence and defense industry, having first joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1989 working as a photographic specialist for the Directorate of Science and Technology’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. Brower holds a Photographic Science degree from Randolph Technical College and a Behavioral Science degree from National Louis University.

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

Citing delays with Europe’s new Vega-C rocket, two Vega booster failures and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Italian Space Agency (ASI) has shifted the launch of the second COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation (CSG-2) Earth observation satellite to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

“The delays, postponing the Vega-C Maiden Flight to Q1 2022, with a consequent tight schedule of launches in 2022, made the  launch period of CSG-2 no longer compatible with the needs of the COSMO Mission. Since Arianespace backlog was already full on Soyuz and Ariane systems in 2021, it was not possible to have a European back-up solution compliant with the CSG-2 schedule, thus an alternative solution with the US provider SpaceX has been adopted allowing to keep the CSG-2 launch within the current year,” ASI said on its website.

PARIS, October 2, 2021 (ESA PR) — The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has captured its first views of its destination planet Mercury as it swooped past in a close gravity assist flyby last night.

WASHINGTON (NASA PR) — NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will co-host the Alliances for Climate Action, a virtual series to address rising demand for accurate, timely, and actionable information at a time of rapid global climate change. The first event, featuring NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, will take place noon EDT Wednesday, Oct. 6, and will livestream on the agency’s website.

Attendees throughout the series will learn about progress in climate research, engage with industry peers, and identify opportunities for collaboration. The series is free an open to the public.

MOSCOW (Roscosmos PR) — The crew members of the Soyuz MS-19 manned transport spacecraft docked on October 5, 2021 to the Rassvet Small Research Module of the Russian Segment of the International Space Station, opened the passageways and boarded the ISS. Then the first communication session of the crew of the 65th long-term expedition with the Baikonur cosmodrome and the TsNIIMash Mission Control Center (part of the Roscosmos State Corporation) took place.

WESTMINSTER, Colo., October 4, 2021 (Maxar Technologies PR) — Maxar Technologies (NYSE:MAXR) (TSX:MAXR), a trusted partner and innovator in Earth Intelligence and Space Infrastructure, today announced it has been awarded an Option Year 2 contract renewal by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for the Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery (G-EGD) program. The contract, which began September 1, 2021, is valued at $44 million. This is the second of three option years for the contract, which has a total value of up to $176M.

With this award, Maxar will continue to provide more than 400,000 U.S. government users with unclassified, online and offline, on-demand access to high-resolution commercial imagery from Maxar in addition to geospatial data from other industry providers. Since 2011, the G-EGD program has enabled warfighters, first responders, intelligence analysts and civil government users to tap into Maxar’s 125-petabyte historical imagery library and daily imagery collections for time-sensitive, mission-critical planning and operations.

DENVER, October 4, 2021 (BridgeComm PR) — BridgeComm, Inc., a leader in optical wireless communications (OWC) solutions and services, today announced that it will enter into a strategic agreement with HySpecIQ, a satellite-powered hyperspectral analytics company. BridgeComm’s high-speed optical downlink was selected for integration on HySpecIQ’s new low earth orbit (LEO) constellation.

BridgeComm’s laser communications downlink terminals and network of optical ground stations, will enable ultra secure, ultra fast, very high data transmission capabilities necessary for the HySpecIQ mission.

Agreement Positions Tomorrow.io to Deliver Data to the Air Force, Other Government Organizations and Commercial Entities. 

Boston, September 30, 2021 (Tomorrow.io PR) – Tomorrow.io, the world’s leading weather intelligence and climate security company, today announced that it was awarded a $19.3 million contract from the U.S. Air Force to support deployment of its proprietary radar-equipped weather satellites. The contract paves the way for a first-of-its-kind, commercially-owned constellation of approximately 32 small satellites to provide global coverage of 3-D precipitation and other critical weather and ocean observations, with much faster revisit times than currently available. 

Tomorrow.io will offer data-as-a-service from its spaceborne radars to the U.S. Air Force and other governmental agencies worldwide, while the main use will be direct ingestion into its proprietary modeling suite, which includes numerical weather models, AI-enabled nowcasting and flood forecasting. These cutting-edge models power Tomorrow.io’s Weather Intelligence Platform™, used by hundreds of businesses and organizations to plan for and respond to increasingly extreme weather and climate conditions.