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Saab ships laminar wing Section as Airbus A340-300 moves toward 2017 flight tests; NASA fires 3-D-sprinted rocket motor; Clean Sky tests of advanced business-jet design; Sea-Tac RFP for biofuel study; U.K. pushes out R&D commitment to 2026.
Through partnerships and investments, defense primes and OEMs are increasingly turning the page away from the old playbook of acquiring and subsuming new technology.
France’s defense ministry will begin work on three new major space-system developments in the coming year, including an international collaboration with Germany in the area of remote sensing and an operational follow-on to the Elisa signals-intelligence demo.
2015 could well turn up in the history books as the year humankind finally realized it could be a spacefairing species, and started reaping the benefits.
UP Aerospace takes its experience building and operating low-cost suborbital sounding rockets and applies it to a dedicated launch vehicle for tiny cubesats.
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.
