The Department of the Air Force has conducted its first-ever Space Acquisition Council meeting and discussed the need for integration and synchronization across the national security space community, current and projected threats to U.S. interests in space, and the impact of the COVID-19 environment on the aerospace industry.
France–The European Space Agency (ESA)’s BepiColombo, the probe it launched in 2018 to study the planet Mercury, is performing a flyby of Earth this week as a gravity-assist maneuver in its seven-year-long journey.
“Honey, I shrunk the NASA payload,” is a global crowdsourcing initiative unveiled by the space agency on April 9 to significantly reduce the size of rugged instruments, sensors and experiments that can be launched to the Moon.
NASA will invest $7 million to advance a range of 23 early stage technologies with the potential to hasten the journey of humans to Mars and increase the odds of success for robotic missions selected to explore potentially habitable extrasolar planets and ocean worlds.
President Donald Trump on April 6 signed a new national space policy directive reaffirming U.S. commitment to the commercial use of resources in space and encouraging international support for the policy.
A third SpaceX Starship prototype was destroyed early April 3 during a tanking pressurization test with cryogenic nitrogen to simulate flight temperatures and pressures.
NASA’s long-term strategy for a sustained human exploration of the Moon is to produce scientific, economic and geopolitical dividends as well as establish a sustainable proving ground for longer missions to Mars—and all executed with commercial partners and global alliances.
NASA is reviving its stylized “worm” logo, the popular version of the acronym for the agency’s full name that was retired in 1992 following a 17-year run.
The Space Development Agency plans to issue a request for proposals for an initial tranche of 20 satellites that will begin to form a low-latency network connecting all sensors, shooters and data from all domains of warfare.
Virgin Orbit, a startup small-satellite launch company owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, will partner with Oita Prefecture, located on the island of Kyushu in Japan, to develop a horizontal launch site for its air-launched LauncherOne service.
Taiwanese space launch company Tispace has rescheduled its first flight to June in response to the COVID-19 crisis while continuing development work and preparing for production.
More than 12,000 well-educated aspirants representing every U.S. state and territory have applied for an uncertain and perhaps modest number of openings in NASA’s astronaut corps.
The global space economy showed strong momentum in 2019 but faces a significant challenge going forward due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Space Foundation cautions in the first quarterly installment of its annual economic assessment.
The Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center has awarded two contracts worth up to $500 million each to Raytheon and L3Harris Technologies to develop and produce new, secure modems.
Over the next three to six months, the Department of the Air Force is transferring 23 missions from the U.S. Air Force to the Space Force, expanding the nascent service’s responsibilities.
Veteran astronauts Shannon Walker of NASA and Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have been added to the crew of the first operational mission under SpaceX’s Commercial Crew flight services contract.
Virgin Orbit has developed a new, mass-producible bridge ventilator that is pending clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to fight the novel coronavirus.
NASA has selected the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, a multiple small satellite mission to study how the Sun generates giant solar particle storms while mapping the host star’s magnetic field lines as they extend outward into the Solar System.
China appears to have developed at least one and perhaps three direct-ascent anti-satellite programs, one of which appears to have been declared operational, according to a pair of reports issued March 30 on global space threats.
