As Russian forces began to substantially build up on the border with Ukraine, the U.S. intelligence community went to commercial satellite imagery providers with a favor to ask.
Rocket Lab will attempt its first midair capture of a returning Electron booster later this month, a key step in the company’s quest to turn what was an expendable small satellite launcher into a partly reusable booster.
The Space Development Agency wants to ensure that all bidders will have an equal shot at awards under the upcoming Tranche 1 Tracking Layer decision, though another recent SDA award has shown the “optics” of incumbents getting a leg up.
The largest commercial procurement of launch vehicles in history has seen Amazon sign contracts for a fleet of up to 83 heavy-lift launchers to send its Kuiper constellation into orbit.
Employment in the core U.S. space industry workforce is at a 10-year high, climbing past 2011’s last peak of 149,818 to reach 151,797, according to preliminary 2021 U.S. data cited by the Space Foundation on April 4.
Astra Space, a small rocket startup that became a publicly traded company last year via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) but which has struggled with successful missions, plans to add turnkey satellite busses to its offering in 2023.
Predictions about an increase in attacks on space capabilities made over the last five years are proving true, say a pair of new reports issued by Washington, D.C.-based think tanks April 4.
Launch of the privately funded Axiom Space-1 mission to the International Space Station was delayed to no earlier than April 8, leaving little margin for Axiom’s planned 10-day excursion before NASA puts priority on launching the next resident station crew.
HawkEye 360 and Kleos Space, operators of space-based radio frequency monitoring services, launched on April 1 two new batches of satellites into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that took off from Cape Canaveral.
Just ahead of a high-profile, privately funded crewed mission for Axiom Space, SpaceX on April 1 launched its fourth rideshare mission, delivering 40 spacecraft into orbit, including a 1-ton hyperspectral imaging satellite for Germany’s space agency, DLR.
Daily space-based imagery and services provider Planet Labs expects full-year revenue this fiscal year to be $170-190 million, practically 30% above last fiscal year, which was 16% above the year before.
AST SpaceMobile, a newly public startup aiming to provide space-based cellular broadband connectivity, remains on track to launch its experimental BlueWalker 3 satellite this summer, managers said late March 31.
Redwire, a newly public in-space manufacturing and services startup, expects to be part of at least eight planned launches this year after notching a dozen in 2021 and growing its backlog of work to almost $272 million.
As it awaits its seventh mission via a Falcon 9 launch imminently, Ion Satellite Carrier provider D-Orbit–which is going public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC)–expects to have 20 space tugs operational by 2023, a top executive says.
Blue Origin conducted its fourth crewed flight on March 31, sending five paying passengers and employee Gary Lai—the lead architect for the New Shepard transportation system—into suborbital space.
Ad Astra Rocket Co., Costa Rica SRL, and Mesoamerica, a Latin American asset manager, are forming a joint venture, ProNova Energy, to develop green hydrogen energy strategies for a global customer base and Latin American prospects
Aphelion Aerospace, a five-year-old startup targeting nanosatellite launches with its proposed environmentally friendly fueled rocket, is launching a crowdsourcing funding effort.
Eyeing fast-growing demand for small satellite constellations from both defense and commercial customers, Boeing subsidiary Millennium Space Systems is opening a new “high-throughput” small satellite production facility.
Dave King, who took over as chief executive of Dynetics in 2015 to shepherd the company’s breakout and ultimately successful sale to Leidos in 2020, is stepping aside.
