Stories about US and international civil space missions, including those led by NASA and ESA.
Japan’s astronaut corps Across the Pacific, two cadres of spacefaring hopefuls are getting the chance to train for extended stays off Earth. This week, China and Japan both announced plans to train new astronauts to support their respective human spaceflight programs. Two candidates have joined Japan’s astronaut corps. Yesterday, JAXA announced the new recruits—the first […]
For the past few years, news of Western private constellation buildouts has become commonplace. At various stages of maturity, these constellations are intended to provide broadband across the globe. Now, though, more nations are drawing up their own plans to bring that broadband capability within the hands of their own governments. IRIS2 The EU’s sovereign […]
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is requesting a staggering $350M from state legislators to form a Texas Space Commission, as first reported by Ars Technica. While details on specific allocations have yet to be determined, the overall goal of the funding will be to further establish Texas as a space hub. “With companies seeking to expand […]
Last week, NASA released a new crowdsourcing competition to build out a virtual reality (VR) Mars simulator. The agency would be able to use the simulator to prepare astronauts for the various scenarios they may encounter on a mission to the Red Planet. The competition: Participants are given access to a pre-constructed digital world that […]
Last week, Georgia’s Supreme Court upheld a referendum in which residents voted to block Camden county from building a spaceport. The legal challenge by Camden County Commissioners, who sought to have the referendum declared invalid, was rejected unanimously. The backstory: Spaceport Camden has been a contentious issue in the county for over a decade, with […]
Another megaconstellation has cleared a key step toward LEO deployment. On Wednesday, the FCC approved Kuiper’s orbital debris mitigation plan, a significant regulatory hurdle that has been keeping Amazon’s broadband constellation out of the sky. The story so far: Amazon has taken a long, winding road with Kuiper. In 2020, the FCC approved the constellation, […]
Later today, two trailblazing American astronauts will receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor at the White House. The details: Vice President Kamala Harris will award former NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken the medal at 4:15pm ET today. The medal was last awarded to Robert Crippen, the pilot of the first space shuttle […]
The aerospace & defense (A&D) primes started reporting fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, with Raytheon ($RTX) teeing off first, followed by Lockheed Martin ($LMT), Boeing ($BA), General Dynamics ($GD), and Northrop Grumman ($NOC) this morning. Across the board, companies’ results and forward-looking projections were on the one hand buoyed by sky-high American and allied defense budgets. […]
After a 50-year hiatus, the US is planning to test a nuclear fission-powered thermal propulsion system on a spacecraft. NASA said this week that it would team up with DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D arm, to build, launch, and demonstrate a nuclear thermal engine. This early work is intended to pave the way for a crewed […]
Canada is opening the doors to commercial launch. On Friday, Canadian Transport Minister Omar Alghabra announced that within the next three years, the country will set up the regulatory framework and licensing processes necessary to greenlight domestic launches. “For many years, Canadian satellites have launched from sites in other countries,” Alghabra said. “It’s time for […]
Through 60 Minutes, Congress, and incremental declassification, American citizens have been treated to a closer look into what the US government’s “aliens(???)” desktop folder looks like. Driving the news: The intelligence community’s (IC) quest to understand elusive UFO-esque unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings has borne fruit. Those fruits, though, don’t offer any conclusive evidence of […]
In its flagship Space Economy Report published this morning, Paris-based Euroconsult finds that the space market grew 8% in 2022. This report is the gold standard for market intelligence on the end-to-end space economy, from upstream manufacturers to downstream service providers and end users across civil, military, and commercial space. The space value chain… …as […]
