Commercial Space

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.

NASA is asking the aerospace industry to describe a commercial strategy for the planned deorbiting of the International Space Station, which is currently planned for the end of 2030.

The Defense Department wants to host Space Experiment Review Board payloads on off-the-shelf smallsats.

The U.S. Space Council, in coordination with a variety of regulatory agencies, plans to start meeting with private space companies to discuss reforming space regulation to accommodate new technologies.

Russia's ban on exporting RD-181 engines to U.S. spurs change.

Capella Space’s third generation of synthetic aperture radar satellites, named Acadia, will feature inter-satellite laser communications systems, faster downlinks and higher resolution images.

Blue Canyon Technologies has won a contract to build 18 small passive microwave sounder satellites for weather data company The Tomorrow Companies.

The Federal Communications Commission is revoking plans to award SpaceX up to $886 million over 10 years to subsidize broadband internet service to rural households in the U.S. via the Starlink satellite network.

Benchmark Space Systems has signed an agreement to buy Alameda Applied Sciences Corporation’s electric propulsion technologies.