Space

DALLAS — NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will manage the agency’s efforts to develop a lander needed to achieve the goal of landing astronauts on the moon by 2024, an announcement overshadowed by political wrangling about what center should be responsible. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, speaking at Marshall and flanked by three House members from

WASHINGTON — APT Satellite says it has received $21 million in insurance payments for the partial failure of the Apstar-6 communications satellite in May 2018.  In a report to the Hong Kong stock exchange released Aug. 8, the operator said most of the indemnity payments relating to Apstar-6’s partial solar power loss have been collected.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, still wants to drop nuclear bombs on Mars to transform it into a livable planet for humans — as evidenced by his latest tweet on Friday morning. Nuke Mars! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 16, 2019 Musk believes that by hitting Mars with nuclear weapons, the planet’s polar

HELSINKI — India’s second lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, is scheduled to enter lunar orbit Aug. 20 following a relatively circuitous journey to the moon. Back on Earth, India’s future space ambitions are also developing. The Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft entered lunar transfer trajectory Aug. 13 following five orbit maneuvers to raise its initial elliptical geocentric orbit after launch

It looks like we’ve bagged another win for gravitational wave astronomy. A new gravitational wave detection is the best candidate yet for a type of cosmic collision never seen – the elusive merger between a black hole and a neutron star. The event, called S190814bv, was detected by the LIGO and Virgo interferometers at 11

OSP-4 is designed to accommodate payloads greater than 400 lbs. The Air Force projects it will procure about 20 missions over nine years. WASHINGTON — The Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center’s Launch Enterprise is requesting industry bids for the Orbital Services Program-4. Proposals are due Aug. 29. OSP-4 is managed by the Rocket

SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. — As Virgin Galactic prepares to finish the test program for its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, the company says the New Mexico spaceport it will operate from is ready. At an Aug. 15 media event at Spaceport America, located in the New Mexico desert north of the city of Las Cruces, executives showed

WASHINGTON — Lacuna Space CEO Rob Spurrett says he’s well aware his 3-year-old startup is part of a cresting wave of Internet of Things ventures seeking to deploy constellations of cubesats to connect a world awash in smart devices. At least 16 companies are targeting the IoT market with smallsats, according to NSR analyst Alan

To receive FIRST UP Satcom, a weekly SpaceNews newsletter for satellite and telecom professionals, sign up here. TOP STORIES Australian farmers are celebrating the start of less restrictive satellite internet from the country’s twin Sky Muster broadband satellites. NBN, operator of the Ka-band satellites, announced Sky Muster Plus Aug. 11, providing an option for homes and business

Jupiter’s core is a bizarre mix of solid rocks mixed with a diffuse bubble of hydrogen gas. And the story of how it got that way has long eluded explanation. But now scientists think they’re on to something, suggesting that the gas giant absorbed another protoplanet during a head-on collision some 4.5 billion years ago

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — Sierra Nevada Corp. announced Aug. 14 that it will use United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan launch vehicle for sending Dream Chaser cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station starting in late 2021. In a joint announcement at SNC Space Systems offices in suburban Denver, the companies announced that SNC had selected Vulcan

SAN FRANCISCO – Spire Global announced an agreement Aug. 13 to share data and develop new products alongside Concirrus, a London-based insurance analytics company. “The insurance sector is a data-based industry at its core and Spire can add deep intrinsic value to existing forecasting and modeling capabilities,” Peter Platzer, Spire Global CEO, told SpaceNews by

There are few things more special than watching a shooting star streak across the sky on a warm summer evening. Viewers across the United States will have a chance Sunday night into the pre-dawn hours on Monday, as well as Monday night into early Tuesday morning, when a dozen meteors per hour and possibly up

WASHINGTON — NASA will perform an independent review of the non-profit organization that runs the portion of the International Space Station designated a national laboratory while also calling for a “strategic pause” in that organization’s work. In a pair of tweets late Aug. 13, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he was calling for the independent

One of the biggest mysteries out there in the Universe is inching closer to answers. An astonishing eight new repeating radio signals known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected flaring from deep space. At the start of 2019, just one of these mysterious signals, FRB 121102, was known to flash repeatedly. In January,

WASHINGTON — As NASA gears up a decade-long effort to return samples from Mars, some scientists are worried that the campaign may not leave any funding available for other robotic missions to the planet. The only future NASA mission to Mars under development is Mars 2020, a rover currently in the final stages of assembly

Picture two tissue box-sized spacecraft orbiting Earth. Then picture them communicating, and using a water-powered thruster to approach each other. If you can do that, then you’re up to speed on one of the activities of NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program (SSTP.) It’s all part of NASA’s effort to develop small spacecraft to serve their

BAE Systems originally won the contract for the Hallmark Tools, Capabilities, and Evaluation Methodology program in November 2017. WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded BAE Systems the second phase of an existing $12.8 million contract to develop digital tools to test and evaluate technologies for space command and control. The second phase

A peculiar hiccup in the rotation speed of a dead star has turned out to be even more interesting than we thought. For the first time, astronomers have shown that the rotation of the Vela pulsar slowed down immediately before its 2016 glitch. Not only was this completely unexpected, it could help us narrow down

WASHINGTON — The European Space Agency said Aug. 12 that another test of the parachutes that will be used on the ExoMars 2020 lander mission failed last week, putting the schedule of the mission into jeopardy. The Aug. 5 test, using a high-altitude balloon above the Esrange test site in northern Sweden, was intended to

Gigantic interplanetary shockwaves reverberate across our Solar System, originating from the Sun and the bursts of charged particles or solar winds escaping it. But measuring such a shock in detail takes some very finely tuned instruments – and scientists just managed it for the first time. These shocks are made up of particles transferring energy

ATLANTA — As Russia prepares to launch an experimental humanoid robot to the International Space Station later this month, a similar NASA robot is being readied for a return to the station after repairs on Earth. In an Aug. 1 presentation at the ISS Research and Development Conference here, Jonathan Rogers, deputy project manager for

The Universe is vast beyond imagination, containing billions upon billions of galaxies. We have a pretty good handle on a lot of galactic dynamics, but how these colossal objects form, grow, and change is still something we’re struggling to understand. Enter the UniverseMachine: simulation software run on a powerful supercomputer, able to grow millions of

A rendering of Mecano ID’s Ejection of Satellite System. Credit: Mecano ID. WASHINGTON — Mecano ID, a supplier of spacecraft structures and radio-frequency components, is expanding into the smallsat business with the help of the French space agency CNES. The deployer, still under development, is Mecano ID’s first smallsat product, Didier Zely, manager of Mecano

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is relatively quiet. It’s not an active nucleus, spewing light and heat into the space around it; most of the time, the black hole’s activity is low key, with minimal fluctuations in its brightness. Most of the time. Recently, astronomers caught it

ATLANTA — An experimental module added to the International Space Station three years ago to test expandable module technologies has been cleared to remain on the station through the late 2020s. In a July 30 presentation at the ISS Research and Development Conference here, Nathan Wells, an instrumentation lead for the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module

Scientists studying freshly fallen snow in Antarctica have uncovered a rare isotope of iron in the interstellar dust hidden inside it, suggesting the dust showed up recently. This discovery could give us crucial information about the history of stellar explosions in our galactic neighbourhood. We know that cosmic dust is drifting down to Earth all

This article originally appeared in the July 29, 2019 issue of SpaceNews magazine. When Spire Global was building a constellation of cubesats to gather maritime and weather data in 2015, the startup built its own UHF ground station network. Now, most startups wouldn’t consider building their own ground systems because they can rely on a

Black holes are easily amongst the most enigmatic objects in the Universe, and there’s plenty we still don’t know about how they’re produced and how they evolve. Now, new research suggests a way of finding black hole ‘nurseries’ with the right conditions for spawning massive black hole mergers. Since we first detected gravitational waves in

This article originally appeared in the July 29, 2019 issue of SpaceNews magazine. Tim Pickens has vivid memories of Project Apollo. Growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, where his father worked at Redstone Arsenal, Pickens recalls his father explaining why their home windows were vibrating. Saturn V was undergoing testing nearby. “My passion to get us

Just like our own Milky Way, most of the universe’s galaxies are shaped like spirals, with long swirling arms of cosmic matter stemming from a bright core. Still, they don’t always appear like that to us. When viewed from the side, spiral galaxies can look deceivingly linear, as a new image from the Hubble Space

LOGAN, Utah — As Virgin Orbit prepares to attempt its first orbital launch later this year, the company is offering a long-term vision of using multiple planes flying from multiple spaceports to be able to deploy an entire constellation within hours. In an Aug. 7 presentation at the Conference on Small Satellites at Utah State

LOGAN, Utah — Iceye is publicly releasing its first synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery with a resolution of less than one meter. “Under one-meter resolution imaging from SAR satellites under 100 kilograms is a remarkable technological achievement,” Iceye CEO Rafal Modrzewski told SpaceNews by email. “It helps in solving a different set of Earth

Astrobiologists have sent 18 different strains of bacteria up to the International Space Station. They’re not meant to contaminate the already-kinda-gross orbital research center, but rather to determine whether the mineral-leaching microbes could help astronauts mine space rocks during future missions, Space.com reports. If the so-called BioRock experiment pans out, the researchers behind the experiment

This op-ed originally appeared in the June 10, 2019 issue of SpaceNews magazine. Satellite communications is under threat and in danger of losing its relevance. Fiber connections continue to roll out across the world, giving consumers fast and reliable connectivity even in some of the more rural, previously unconnected areas. With communities continuing to put

PARK CITY, Utah — Small launch vehicle company Vector has replaced its founding chief executive amid reports that financial difficulties have forced the company to close, at least temporarily, its facilities. “Jim Cantrell is no longer with Vector effective today. John Garvey has assumed the role of CEO,” a company spokesperson told SpaceNews Aug. 9.

Dark matter might well be the biggest mystery in the Universe. We know there’s something out there making things move faster than they should. But we don’t know what it is, and we sure as heck don’t know where it came from. According to a new paper, the origins of dark matter may be more

WASHINGTON — Fleet operator Viasat, already in the middle of building a trio of high-capacity broadband satellites, has started work on a next-generation constellation, CEO Mark Dankberg said Aug. 8.  A ViaSat-4 series is in early development, extensively leveraging research and development on the 1-terabit-per-second or more ViaSat-3 satellites, Dankberg said during an earnings call. 

A horde of microscopic critters called tardigrades were passengers aboard the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet, which crashed into the lunar surface nearly four months ago. But because tardigrates can survive in extreme environments, it’s likely these tiny astronauts are still alive. The microscopic organisms can go without water and oxygen for long periods of time in

WASHINGTON — Megaconstellation startup OneWeb asked a court to dismiss a June lawsuit by Virgin Orbit, claiming that it doesn’t accurately portray a 2015 launch contract.  Virgin Orbit, whose LauncherOne small launch vehicle is nearing a maiden flight, sued OneWeb for cancelling in June 2018 all but four of 39 launches it had purchased. Virgin

Recently, Jupiter entered a position in the sky known as opposition: almost directly opposite the Sun from Earth. It’s the perfect time for eyeballing our Solar System’s biggest planet – and the Hubble Space Telescope got in on the action. On 27 June, as opposition was waning, Hubble snapped a stunning new photo, revealing Jupiter

On the way to its target orbit, the Atlas’ Centaur upper stage rocket released a cubesat that was riding as a secondary payload. WASHINGTON — The Air Force’s Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF-5) communications satellite reached orbit on Thursday after it successfully separated from a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket approximately 5 hours and

SpaceX snatched a rocket nose out of the sky – and CEO Elon Musk posted a video of the moment on Twitter. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched an AMOS-17 communications satellite at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Tuesday. The launch took place at 7:23 pm, and the satellite was deployed 31

Griffin: “Some elements of Congress are very supportive. Others are skeptical.” HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The Space Development Agency has an ambitious agenda, including the design of a military space architecture in low Earth orbit that would enable global communications and help protect U.S. forces from missile attacks. But work remains largely on hold until Congress

With Jupiter currently gracing the northern sky at night, it’s a great time to be pointing a telescope at our Solar System’s colossus. But one astrophotographer got the sight of a lifetime – what appears to be the flash of an impact, as something exploded in the planet’s thick upper atmosphere. On 7 August 2019,

As modern weapons systems become more automated and connected, they become more vulnerable to cyber threats: attacks on IP addresses, radio frequency (RF) manipulation, supply chain risk, human error (e.g., downloading a malicious attachment), and more. Unfortunately, much of today’s systems were never designed with these kinds of attacks in mind—or even cybersecurity in general.

With Jupiter currently gracing the northern sky at night, it’s a great time to be pointing a telescope at our Solar System’s colossus. But one astrophotographer got the sight of a lifetime – what appears to be the flash of an impact, as something exploded in the planet’s thick upper atmosphere. On 7 August 2019,

The ASLON-45 space vehicle manifest will consist of multiple 3U and larger U.S. government cubesats to low earth orbit. HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Small launch provider Vector Launch has received a $3.4 million contract from the Air Force Rocket Systems Launch Program office to lift experimental satellites to low Earth orbit. The Air Force Space and