Airbus Defence and Space, has signed as the leader of the industrial team - including Thales Alenia Space as co-prime contractor - a contract with the Armed Forces of the United Arab Emirates (UAEAF) for the development, manufacture and launch of Falcon Eye, a high-performance optical Earth-observation satellite system.
AW&ST: What technical milestones are coming up at Orbital Sciences Corp. and Thales Alenia Space between now and the June 2015 launch of the first Iridium NEXT satellites?
An industry proposal made in June has apparently succeeded in toppling a next-generation rocket design that European governments approved in 2012 and had hoped to begin developing next year.
Leaders in the global space industry will return to Dubai for the World Space Risk Forum 2014 from 12 to 14 May. Hosted at Raffles Dubai, the biennial event brings together leading professionals representing all aspects of the space industry. The predominant focus of the event is on understanding and mitigating risk so as to further promote business development and exploration in space.
DubaiSat-2 developed by Emirates Institution of Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) has captured an image of the Dubai International airport from outer space.
The Moon is the next world for humanity to explore and turn into a new home—even as we push out into the deeper ocean of space. -Forty-five years ago, a few of us wandered her surface, yet we turned away, not realizing the importance of what we had done—or what could be done. Now it is clearly time to return and, by learning how to live there, to prepare ourselves to plant the seeds of humanity on the red sands of Mars.
Northrop Grumman has unveiled a vertical-launch, horizontal-landing reusable booster design for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s XS-1 experimental spaceplane.
Cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev deployed a Peruvian cubesat and worked with materials-space-exposure experiments during a 5-hr. extra-vehicular excursion at the International Space Station Aug. 18. Unlike cubesat deployments from the Japanese Kibo module’s robotic arm, which use a mechanical dispenser, Artemyev deployed the small satellite with a toss of the hand in the direction opposite the station’s travel to avoid a future collision.
The third Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus commercial cargo carrier to reach the International Space Station reentered the atmosphere Aug. 17 for a splashdown in the Pacific east of New Zealand, wrapping up the second of eight resupply missions for the company under its $1.9 billion commercial resupply services contract with NASA. Carried to orbit July 13 on an Orbital Sciences Antares launch vehicle from Wallops Island, Virginia, the pressurized capsule carried 3,550 lb. of garbage for its destructive return to Earth. It took 3,669 lb.
Aerojet Rocketdyne plans to demonstrate fabrication of large-scale metal rocket-engine parts using laser-melting additive manufacturing (AM) under a cost-shared Technology Investment Agreement with Wright-Patterson AFB under Title III of the Defense Production Act, worth $11,750,886.
The European Union is preparing to launch its first fully operational Galileo navigation, positioning and timing satellites Aug. 22, putting the 28-nation body in line to compete with the U.S. GPS, Russian Glonass and Chinese Beidou systems, even as it finalizes details of Galileo’s use.
Though not as visible as work on the flight elements, upgrades to NASA’s Mission Control at Johnson Space Center here have been underway since the shuttle program’s retirement in 2011. The Mission Control Center for the 21st Century project is intended to set the stage for a U.S. human spaceflight comeback.
