Space

Optical communications technology is gaining ground in space.

MDA has been awarded a $269 million contract by the Canadian Space Agency to complete preliminary design of the Canadarm3 robotic arm for Gateway, a space station planned for lunar orbit.

George Nield, who oversaw commercial spaceflight for the FAA before becoming a private consultant, is among five paying passengers slated to ride on Blue Origin’s next flight of its New Shepard suborbital system, with liftoff targeted for March 23.

Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s Roscosmos space agency has assured the U.S. that NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will be returning to Earth from the International Space Station as planned aboard the Soyuz MS-19 that is set to land in Kazakhstan on March 30.

Whisper’s quiet drone; Avoiding satellite collision; Refueling in space; Hypersonic funding boost; and Rapid hydrogen refueling.

With commercial LEO satellite constellations growing tenfold and governments eager to tap new-space, lasers comms’ have arrived.

Venturi Astrolab, the bespoke European car company’s space startup comprising NASA and SpaceX alumni in Hawthorne, California, has unveiled its Flex rover family for manned Moon and Mars missions.

NASA has reached an “inflection point” as it looks to transition its human-spaceflight focus from low-Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, according to the chair of the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.

Finland’s Aurora Propulsion Technologies and U.S. space traffic-management startup Kayhan Space have partnered to develop a system to autonomously identify collision threats and automate avoidance maneuvers in low Earth orbit.

Slingshot Aerospace has developed a web portal and mobile app, Slingshot Beacon, that allows satellite operators to communicate and avoid satellite collisions in orbit.

The first Moon-class rocket in 50 years is set to roll out to Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B on March 17 for a dress rehearsal and fueling test ahead of launch.

As it plans its Artemis lunar-exploration program, NASA is engaging the planetary-science community in ways not possible during the Apollo 11-17 missions that landed a dozen men trained primarily as test pilots on the lunar surface to gather samples for researchers on Earth.

A NASA program to demonstrate on-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing has passed its mission-critical design review putting it on track for launch in 2025 at the earliest.

An omnibus spending bill approved by U.S. House and Senate appropriations committees on March 9 allocates $24 billion to NASA for fiscal 2022, a $770 million increase over its 2021 budget, but $760 million short of the Biden administration’s request for the year that began Oct. 1, 2021.

A U.S. Space Force (USSF) mission slated to launch aboard United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) next Atlas V has been delayed at the customer’s request, the company said on March 9.

SpaceX on March 9 completed its 10th orbital launch in as many weeks, an unprecedented cadence the company intends to maintain throughout the year.

Developed initially for a handful of test flights at its Gale Crater landing site on Mars, NASA’s small solar-powered Ingenuity drone helicopter has logged 20 flights as it graduated to become a reconnaissance asset for the Perseverance rover.

A robotic applique that could turn a wide range of satellites into servicing spacecraft is to be flight-demonstrated under a contract awarded to Motiv Space Systems by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.

Dubbed “the USB for space,” a robotic connector enabling modular hardware to be attached to spacecraft has been delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) for spaceflight qualification.

SpaceX has delivered Starlink terminals to Ukraine, worked to bypass jamming of the devices and is contemplating future space projects in the country.

The payload fairing separation problem that scuttled Astra’s first commercial mission has been traced to an error in an engineering drawing that led to the fairing’s five separation mechanisms firing out of order.

Maxar has generated a 3D video of a 40-mi.-long Russian military convoy stalled on a road north of Kyiv using its WorldView-3 satellite.

Artemis I, NASA’s approaching test flight of the Space Launch System rocket and uncrewed Orion capsule around the Moon and back to Earth, could be paving the way for more than human deep-space exploration.

Artemis I, NASA’s approaching test flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and uncrewed Orion capsule around the Moon and back to Earth, could be paving the way for more than human deep-space exploration if the world’s most powerful rocket lives up to expectations that include launching more than astronauts.

Russian State Space Corp. Roscosmos formally canceled the launch of 36 OneWeb satellites aboard the Soyuz 2.1b rocket that had been slated to lift off on March 4 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.