Firefly Aerospace, which plans to debut its Alpha small satellite launch vehicle this year, has signed contracts with Spire Global and Geometric Space Corp. for multiple flights.
“The SPEAR flight demonstrator will provide the F/A-18 Super Hornet and carrier strike group with significant improvements in range and survivability against advanced threat defensive systems,” said Steve Mercer, Boeing’s SPEAR program manager.
NASA and the European Space Agency have signed contracts with privately owned Nanoracks to use the company’s Bishop airlock, which is due to be delivered to the International Space Station next month.
Ukraine has already purchased Baykar Makina Bayraktar TB2 unmanned air systems from Turkey and is a partner in the development on the company’s larger Akinci medium-altitude, long-endurance platform.
With the arrival of 60 more Starlink satellites into orbit on Oct. 18 and another 60 due to launch this week, SpaceX intends to roll out public trials of its high-speed internet service before year’s end.
The modest sample of pebbles and soil that NASA’s Osiris-Rex sample return mission will attempt to gather from the asteroid Bennu may hold important clues to how life arose on Earth and perhaps other planetary bodies.
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is supporting the Space Development Agency by building a hardware and software testbed for optical communications to enable interoperability between different satellites.
Swedish defense firm Saab has taken a 1.1 billion Swedish Krona ($130 million) charge over impacts on production of the Gripen combat aircraft due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
NASA has selected Intuitive Machines to launch and deliver a drill and mass spectrometer payload to the Moon by December 2022 to seek out seek out and attempt to harvest subsurface water ice at the lunar south pole for the first time.
There is promising new science on the horizon as NASA’s nimble Osiris-Rex sample return spacecraft prepares for a daring brief encounter on Oct. 20 with its distant target, the primitive asteroid Bennu.
