Commercial Space

Avio, the prime contractor in Europe’s Vega light launcher program, is working on an experimental launch vehicle using only a liquid oxygen-methane propellant.

New satellite technologies are expected to enable more accurate forecasting of severe weather phenomena.

Against a backdrop of tough geopolitical and economic issues, Director General Josef Aschbacher has to convince the agency’s 22 member states that those difficulties are precisely why they need to invest more into space.

Virgin Galactic is reviewing initial responses to RFPs for structural and systems components for the company’s planned new Delta-class spaceplanes as it looks ahead to serial production.

Our roundup of the main aerospace and defense stories making the news this week.

Airbus is testing a pair of UK defense cubesats in readiness for the first orbital launch from the UK.

Rocket Lab has signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with U.S. Transportation Command to explore using the company’s Neutron and Electron launch vehicles to transport cargo around the world.

Albedo, a startup developing very-low-Earth-orbit imagery satellites, has raised a $48 million Series A round.

Only one agency has the independence, credibility and technical expertise to investigate.

Placing Eutelsat's Konnect VHTS into orbit signals the beginning of the end for Europe’s Ariane 5 workhorse.

A British think tank suggests the UK should leave Copernicus and develop its own Earth observation program with the European Space Agency.

Private equity investors CIC Partners and Juniper Capital Management have teamed to buy Applegate EDM and Icon Machine, both in the Dallas area, to create a new portfolio company called Precision Aerospace that focuses on exotic and precision metal work for defense and commercial space.

OQ Technology, a 5G Internet-of-Things satellite startup, has received a €13 million ($12.9 million) Series A investment led by Wa’ed Ventures, the venture capital arm of oil-and-gas company Saudi Aramco.

SpaceX joins race to connect mobile phones via low-Earth-orbit satellites.

NASA has added five more missions to SpaceX’s crew transportation services contract, bringing the total value for 14 flights to $4.9 billion.

NASA and Axiom Space have signed a mission order for a second four-person private astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS), planned for the second quarter of 2023.

Royal Caribbean Group plans to start installing SpaceX’s Starlink satellite dishes aboard its cruise ships.

Satellite-based hyperspectral imagery and data provider Pixxel expects to launch its first “commercial-phase” satellites in early 2023, followed by more later that year, representatives said in August while revealing the startup’s latest strategic backer, Accenture.

Outpost Technologies has raised a $7.1 million seed round to develop satellite re-entry and recovery technology.

T-Mobile has announced an agreement to use SpaceX’s Starlink constellation of low-Earth-orbit communications satellites for text message coverage across the continental U.S., Hawaii, parts of Alaska, Puerto Rico and U.S. territorial waters—remote regions outside the signal of T-Mobile’s terrestrial network.

Our roundup of the main aerospace and defense stories making the news this week.

Fifty years after Apollo, NASA is preparing for a permanent presence around the Moon.

The last person to walk on the Moon reflects on the geopolitical importance of a new era of human spaceflight.

The Artemis I flight test of NASA’s superheavy-lift rocket and Orion capsule sets the stage for crewed missions.

Startup Relativity Space successfully completed a full-duration, 20-sec. test run of its Terran 1 rocket with its nine first-stage Aeon liquid oxygen/liquid natural gas engines at Cape Canaveral on Aug. 22, clearing a major hurdle toward a planned debut launch attempt in the coming weeks or months.