IBM’s AI foundation model tech is turning its focus to a new research target: Earth science. This morning, NASA and IBM announced a partnership that leverages the agency’s suite of geospatial data and historical imagery to generate insights on how the Earth and its climate has changed over time. IBM’s AI will analyze petabytes—that’s thousands […]
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 […]
This afternoon in Western Australia, LeoLabs pulled the curtain off a new project that’s been in the making for the last nine months: the Western Australia Space Radar (WASR), built along with local partners to augment the company’s satellite and debris tracking capabilities. WASR is now fully commissioned and includes two S-band phased array radars […]
On Friday, the US Treasury Department placed sanctions on Spacety, a Chinese smallsat developer and SAR provider, due its ties to Russian paramilitary organization Wagner Group. Backing up: The Wagner Group is Russia’s private military firm and is credited with major crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine, the Central African Republic, and Mali. The […]
French launch startup Latitude has completed the first hot fire test campaign of its Navier engine. The engine will power the company’s two-stage Zephyr launch vehicle. Zephyr is designed to be capable of deploying 100 kg payloads to SSO at an altitude of 700 km. The vehicle’s first stage features nine Navier engines and the […]
Floodbase, a Brooklyn, NY-based startup that operates an intelligence engine to help assess and insure flood risk, announced a major rebrand along with a $12M Series A. Lowercarbon Capital led the funding round, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Floating Point and Vidavo. Who’s Floodbase? The artist formerly known as Cloud to Street is working to […]
A mission set to explore the distant, icy moons of Jupiter is go for launch. This week, Airbus announced that the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE, at a stretch) mission is fully assembled in Toulouse, France, and is undergoing final testing before it’s shipped to French Guiana ahead of a planned launch in April. The […]
The aerospace & defense (A&D) primes started reporting fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, with Raytheon ($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. […]
German launch startup Isar Aerospace has signed its first US customer, winning a multi-launch contract from Spaceflight, Inc. The deal will see Isar launch a single dedicated Spectrum flight from Norway’s Andøya Spaceport in 2026. There is also a provision for a second Spectrum flight in 2025. “We’ve seen an increased demand for flexible and […]
Could this be the year of asteroid mining? AstroForge, a YC W22 alum based in Huntington Beach, CA, is trying to make it happen. The company announced that it has booked two missions this year to get its asteroid mining tech to orbit and tested as quickly as possible. Mining asteroids: About a decade ago, […]
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 […]
Quindar, a startup building a web app for satellite owners to design, test, and operate their constellations with little to no human intervention, announced this morning the closing of a $2.5M seed round raised from Y Combinator, FCVC, Soma Capital, and Liquid 2 Ventures. “One of the value propositions of being an aerospace company with […]
