Space

The European Space Agency expects five Ariane 6 launches and four Vega-C liftoffs in 2025 as it heads into a busy year, with the agency's three-year-plan in the balance.

The 2024 launch rate surpassed the 223 orbital launch attempts in 2023, the previous record.

Planned for launch no earlier than late February, the IM-2 mission’s Athena Nova-C lander is to touch down at Mons Mouton.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost vehicle will share the ride with another lunar lander owned by Japan’s iSpace.

Iran plans to complete two space launches in the coming months, the head of the country’s Space Agency Hassan Salariyeh said.

Hours after NASA laid out a new plan for returning Mars samples to Earth, Rocket Lab said it could do so “faster and more affordably.”

Human brainpower is becoming the era’s chief bottleneck.

Either option would cut the flagship $11 billion Mars Sample Return mission’s cost by at least 30% and as much as 47%.

The companies have developed prototypes for the Space Force’s Protected Tactical Satcom program under a 2020 contract award.

The investment is part of a larger strategic capital and business alliance with Toyota aimed at the “mass production of rockets.”

Biomodule spacecraft designed to orbit 24 opossum fetuses in a controllable low-gravity environment had been proposed to the Air Force as a quick means of gaining a relatively large volume of experimental data on weightlessness.

Blue Origin plans to flight-test its first orbital launch vehicle, with liftoff of New Glenn from Cape Canaveral SFS targeted for the early hours of Jan. 10.

Artificial intelligence shows great promise, but safety and ethical considerations are a major challenge in aerospace.

As part of the agreement, AST SpaceMobile will provide Ligado Networks with $113 million of AST SpaceMobile warrants and usage rights payments.

Turion is a non-Earth imaging and in-space mobility company headquartered in Irvine, California.

See some impressive images of the Saturn S-4B Battleship Test shown in photo sequence on page 39 of the January 4, 1965 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology.

An FAA airspace advisory is in effect for New Glenn-1 (NG-1) launch attempts from Jan. 6-12 from Cape Canaveral SFS.

ULA flew two flights for its Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle in 2024, on Jan. 8 and Oct. 4.

“The root cause was identified as a software issue within the ground segment,” Eutelsat said on Jan. 2.

The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) lists spacecraft as one of 15 priority areas in its Fiscal 2025 Investment Strategy.

The telemetry stream received by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab on Jan. 1 was to continue through Jan. 2.

The barge is named Jacklyn after the mother of Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos.

The two agencies are looking for ways to speed up transferring technology developed by federal entities.

Private lunar lander developer ispace is headquartered in Tokyo but has established subsidiaries in the U.S. and Europe.

“This is a monumental milestone and a glimpse of what’s just around the corner for New Glenn’s first launch,” said Jarrett Jones, senior VP, New Glenn.