Illkirch-Graffenstaden, France (Leanspace PR) — Leanspace, the company building the digital infrastructure of the space industry, is today announcing a major milestone in its development with the closing of an oversubscribed Seed financing round of €6m ($6.4m). The funding will be used to scale up Leanspace’s cloud services platform, and was led by Karista and 42CAP, with complementary non-dilutive financing from Bpifrance. The new investors join leading space organizations already backing Leanspace, like Seraphim Space, the International Space University and strategic business angels.

The commercialization of the space industry and the ‘NewSpace’ paradigm have complexified, rather than simplified, the management of space missions. On top of the legacy requirements we’ve seen for decades: reliability, trust and bespoke developments, space programmes of today come with new needs: a drastic increase in agility and reduction of costs.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Space Foundation PR) — Space Foundation, a nonprofit advocate organization founded in 1983, today announced its partnership with the International Space University (ISU), a private non-profit institution, formally recognized as an institute of higher education in France by the French Ministry of Education. The partnership was revealed at a Memorandum of Understanding signing at the 37th Space Symposium at The Broadmoor, Colorado Springs, CO (USA).

OXFORDSHIRE, UK (OrbAstro PR) — OrbAstro has today revealed two new space competitions for students and start-ups to get spacecraft payloads to orbit, Orbital Student and Orbital Start-Up. The company has dedicated some capacity onboard their satellite launching in December 2021 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 to the competition.

Students and start-ups will mature designs for their novel spacecraft payloads, assessed by an independent panel of space industry experts. A short-list of teams will have their payloads put through environmental testing, to ensure they can survive the violence of rocket launch and the space environment. The best teams left standing, two student teams and one start-up, will have their payloads integrated to the OrbAstro satellite and launched. Once in orbit, teams will have the opportunity to carry out satellite and payload operations. 

ICE Cubes experiment unit (Credit: ICE Cubes/ISU)

PARIS (ESA PR) — The newly installed International Commercial Experiments service – ICE Cubes for short – facility providing commercial access to microgravity will soon receive the first experiment cubes after today’s successful SpaceX Dragon resupply launch.

The 15^th resupply mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 5:42 ET (11:42 CEST) with standard cargo for the International Space Station as well as the first 10 x 10 x 10 cm experiment cubes.

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Credit: Douglas Messier

STRASBOURG, France (ISU PR) — This week, more than 150 experts, engineers, educators and students from around the world gathered in Strasbourg, France to participate in the first International Moon Village Workshop. The Workshop was jointly organized by the recently-formed Moon Village Association (MVA) and the International Space University (ISU), and was held at the permanent campus of the ISU.

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Buzz Aldrin has withdrawn from the opening ceremony of the International Space University’s 30th Summer Session Program in Ireland on medical advice, according to a media report. Aldrin, who serves as ISU chancellor, was to have addressed student and faculty in Cork on June 26. He was also scheduled to give the Gerald A. Soffen Memorial Lecture the following day. Good wishes to Buzz as he makes his recovery.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, An Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie
Penguin Press, 2016
Hardcover, 448 pages
ISBN 978-1-59420-672-6
US $28/Canada $37

Reviewed by Douglas Messier

On Sept. 8, I arrived home at about half past noon to find a package sitting on my doorstep. It was a review copy of a new book by Julian Guthrie about the Ansari XPrize and SpaceShipOne titled, How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, An Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight.

I laughed. The timing was perfect. Ken Brown and I had just spent five hours in the desert — most of them in the rising heat of a late summer day — waiting for WhiteKnightTwo to take off carrying SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity on its first captive carry test flight.

It was the first flight in nearly two years of a SpaceShipTwo vehicle since Unity’s sister ship, VSS Enterprise, had broken up during a Halloween test flight, killing co-pilot Mike Alsbury. Ken and I had been there on that day, too.

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BOSTON (ISU PR) — The International Space University (ISU) is seeking applications from American institutions to establish the Robert A. Heinlein Institute for Space Entrepreneurship & Space Innovation on a campus in the United States.

Once established, the Institute will offer a range of training, conferences, seminars, short courses, public events and research related to entrepreneurship and innovation in space commerce. From its central campus in Strasbourg, France, the ISU graduates over 200 students a year in its masters of space science and other space studies programs held on the main campus and at locations around the world.

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Pete Worden

NASA Ames Center Director Pete Worden has announced he is leaving the space agency at the end of March to pursue opportunities in the private sector. He was appointed Ames center director in May 2006 after retiring from a 29-year career in the U.S. Air Force.

Worden has been seen as a maverick within a relatively conservative space agency, pursuing innovative initiatives such as phonesats and synthetic biology while forging close ties with Silicon Valley companies such as Google. NASA Ames hosted an International Space University summer session; its research park is home to the Singularity University and Made in Space.
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STRASBOURG, France (ISU PR) — ArduSat is a nonprofit corporation, established in 2012 by Peter Platzer, Jeroen Cappaert and Joel Spark, all of them alumni of the International Space University. The concept behind the corporation is simple but also very novel, namely to provide cheap and global access to space in an uncomplicated way (see also www.nanosatisfi.com for further info).

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