The same day that rival United Arab Emirates’ Hope spacecraft entered orbit around Mars, Turkey unveiled an ambitious 10-year plan that includes sending an astronaut into orbit and a rover to the surface of the moon. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the country’s lunar rover would be launched in 2023 to mark the centennial of the nation’s founding. “We will go to the moon in 2023,” he said. The 10-year […]

TOULOUSE/PARIS, France, 11 February 2021 (Airbus PR) – The French defence procurement agency (DGA) has awarded Thales and Airbus a contract for the new joint tactical signals intelligence (SIGINT) system to upgrade the French forces’ critical signals monitoring, direction finding and spectrum analysis capabilities.

The 10-year contract will equip the three armed forces with a common information system and set of sensors and is designated a high-impact programme (PEM), alongside CONTACT and SCORPION, under France’s defence spending plan. This joint tactical SIGINT system will provide French armed forces command with an expanded tactical electronic support measures (ESM) capability.

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

Last week, I was hard at work on what I thought would be an exclusive: Virgin Galactic had a close call on its most recent suborbital flight in February 2019, which helped to explain why they had gone 22 months before they tried to repeat the flight in December 2020.

See: As Virgin Galactic Crew Celebrated Second Suborbital Flight, Problems Loomed Behind the Scenes

As I took a short break to scan Twitter, what did I see but that The Washington Post (WaPo) had just published a story on the February 2019 flight. Someone had arranged for the publisher to send the reporter a copy of an upcoming book that had a section about that same flight.

An amazing one-in-a-million coincidence? Or someone — the list of suspects is extremely short — trying to get out ahead of the story and tell their own version through what they view as a more sympathetic reporter?

Well, whatever. I can’t say I was the least bit surprised. To be honest, WaPo’s story was more detailed than mine. And it was one hell of a lot scarier. Really scary. So, let’s look at what engineers found after the flight ended. [Emphasis mine]

BOULDER, Colo., Feb. 10, 2021 (Ball Aerospace PR) — Ball Aerospace has been selected to support Solar Cruiser, a NASA small satellite technology demonstration on the use of solar photons for propulsion in space. Ball will perform several mission-critical functions, including the integration and test of the satellite bus with the solar sail system that will form the completed “Sailcraft.”

CHARLOTTE, NC, February 11, 2021 (Satellogic PR) — Satellogic, the first company to develop a scalable Earth observation platform with the ability to remap the entire planet at both high-frequency and high-resolution, today announced that Thomas VanMatre and Matthew Tirman have joined the Satellogic leadership team.

Thomas VanMatre, former Director of International Business Development at Maxar, will serve as Satellogic’s Vice President of Global Business Development. Matthew Tirman, former Head of Government Business at Descartes labs, joins Satellogic as Head of Satellogic North America.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Analytical Space PR)–Analytical Space, Inc. (ASI) announced today that it has been awarded a $26.4 million, three-year contract by the Department of the Air Force’s commercial investment arm (AF Ventures), with joint funding from the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), as part of the Strategic Financing (STRATFI) program. The award – which will be matched by private investment funds – will result in the research, development, launch, and deployment of six satellites and two additional hosted payload network nodes for Analytical Space’s Fast Pixel Network^TM.

A new NASA paper provides the most detailed map to date of near-surface water ice on the Red Planet.

PASADENA, Calif. (NASA PR) — So you want to build a Mars base. Where to start? Like any human settlement, it would be best located near accessible water. Not only will water be crucial for life-support supplies, it will be used for everything from agriculture to producing the rocket propellant astronauts will need to return to Earth.

A UK parliamentary debate on Thursday afternoon highlighted some of the exciting developments underway in the UK space sector. During a speech by Duncan Baker MP, a reference was made to government support being provided to a number of different UK launch sites, explaining that such support will only return value if there are launch vehicles available and interested in launching from UK soil.

NORFOLK, England (Raptor Aerospace PR) — A space engineering company based in rural Norfolk is currently building a new generation of rockets intended to fuel a revolution in low-cost access to space. The focus from Raptor Aerospace is on reforming the suborbital spaceflight market by providing short-duration access to space environments.

This kind of space access has traditionally been used by scientific researchers in order to collect data and carry out experiments in space. Raptor plan to enable a new responsive, local and cost-effective approach to this market, as well as additionally supporting the ‘newspace’ surge as part of the supply chain for the high-growth area of small satellite manufacture and testing.

CEDAR PARK, TEXAS, February 10, 2021 (Firefly Aerospace PR) – Firefly Aerospace, Inc., a leading provider of economical and dependable launch vehicles, spacecraft, and in-space services, today announced a Launch Services Agreement with Exolaunch GmbH, a leading provider of launch services, mission management and separation systems, to integrate and launch multi-satellite clusters aboard Firefly’s Alpha launch vehicle beginning in 2022.

Just weeks away from the maiden launch of its Alpha rocket, Firefly plans to swiftly accelerate the frequency of Alpha flights through collaborative partnerships, including this strategic partnership with Exolaunch, a German small-satellite integrator known for its substantial flight heritage, flight-proven deployment technologies and high reliability.

BEIJING (China National Space Administration PR) — At 19:52 on February 10, 2021, China’s first Mars exploration mission, Tianwen-1, carried out near-fire capture braking. The 3000N orbital control engine of the orbiter ignited for about 15 minutes, and the probe successfully entered the near-fire altitude. A large elliptical orbit of 400 kilometers, with a period of about 10 Earth days and an inclination of about 10º, has become my country’s […]

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

Suborbital launch used to be a sleepy field that rarely attracted much public attention. Let’s face it, atmospheric research and student experiments are not front-page news. Sounding rockets don’t have the majesty and power of a Falcon 9 or Atlas V.

In recent years, exciting new entrants in the field and widespread streaming of launches have made suborbital flights exciting. Last year saw important suborbital flight tests by SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and Skyrora that garnered worldwide interest.

SINGAPORE, 8 February 2021 (Addvalue PR) – Singapore Exchange Mainboard-listed Addvalue Technologies Ltd (the “Company”), a leading player in the mobile satellite communications industry, announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Addvalue Innovation Pte Ltd (“Addvalue”), has entered into a memorandum of understanding (“MOU”) with Dragonfly Aerospace (“Dragonfly”), a leading South African-based space engineering cum space mission company, for a joint marketing collaboration in cross promoting Dragonfly’s imaging payloads and satellites and Addvalue’s Inter-Satellite Data Relay Service (“IDRS”) (the “Business Collaboration”)..