Agreement has been reached at the World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva on the allocation of radiofrequency spectrum for global flight tracking in civil aviation.
The trick to making international collaboration work applies for 21st-century human space exploration just as it did for railroads in the 19th—standard interfaces.
Which comes first, small satellites or small launch vehicles? With the growth in plans for cubesat constellations, small booster development is moving into high gear.
Pentagon thinkers consider a life beyond Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) and Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) systems as reliance on and vulnerability to satcom systems grows.
With its Cygnus large cargo carriers, Orbital has an eye toward the post-ISS world, when NASA expects to be operating in cislunar space while private companies try to make a profit in orbit much closer to Earth.
The launch of an upgraded Orbital ATK Cygnus commercial cargo spacecraft with more than 7,000 lb. of supplies for the International Space Station moves the orbiting outpost back toward its normal stock of consumables and gives on-board scientific research a boost.
The new business should bring XCOR co-founder Jeff Greason closer to the passion he has carried since he left the computer industry as an Intel executive to join the old Rotary Rocket startup.
The modified passenger 747-400 will be used to carry the space company’s LauncherOne vehicle to 35,000-40,000-ft. altitude from which it will be air-dropped and launched into orbit.
Europe's LISA Pathfinder gravitational-wave-detection mission was successfully placed into orbit Dec. 3 after lifting off atop a Vega light launcher from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana.
The FireSat system will result in revisit times about every 15 min., which begins to approach the warning an experienced firewatcher in a tower can provide firefighters by scanning forest treetops for smoke.
In November, ESA handed NASA the first tangible evidence of its contribution to the Orion development, a structural test article of the European Service Module (ESM) that in the coming months will undergo rigorous environmental trials.
Engineers and scientists are beginning to plan a program of robotic exploration over the next two decades to look for life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Europa, the large icy moon of Jupiter, is first on the list.
Scientists believe they can take the “missing” out of the missing carbon mystery linked to a changing Martian environment that evolved from warmer, wetter conditions 3.8 billion years ago to the current cold, dry realm that persists today.
The test aimed to deploy the six-seat crew capsule into suborbit for a planned 4-min. weightless period, but attention was focused on whether the rocket stage could be successfully recovered using the tricky vertical-powered-landing technique.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket will fly again after achieving an intact powered vertical landing of the launch vehicle and parachute recovery of the unpiloted crew capsule to conclude a test flight.
Blue Origin has successfully launched and landed a reusable rocket for the first time. The New Shepard space vehicle flew to just over 329,000 feet before landing safety at its launch site in Texas. Check out Blue Origin's video of the rocket's test flight.
Flutter-suppression X-56 crashes; laser IDs target by vibrations; new venture to commercialize morphing structures; Airbus helo R&D in the U.K.; Iceye’s low-cost radar imaging from space.
