The U.S. Space Force is allocating three launch complexes at Cape Canaveral, including one used for several NASA Mercury missions six decades ago, to four small launch vehicle startups as the service tries to keep up with growing launch demand.

Europe’s Galileo is the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, providing metre-level accuracy and very precise timing to its four billion users. An essential ingredient to ensure this stays the case are the atomic clocks aboard each satellite, delivering pinpoint timekeeping that is maintained to a few billionths of a second. These clocks are called atomic because their ‘ticks’ come from ultra-rapid, ultra-stable oscillation of atoms between different energy states. Sustaining this performance demands, in turn, even more accurate clocks down on the ground to keep the satellites synchronised and ensure stability of time and positioning for

In-space transportation company Momentus is gearing up for a key test of one orbital transfer vehicle as it ships another for launch next month.

“You can read everything there is to know about driving a car, but you won’t really understand what it’s like to drive one until you get behind the wheel. That’s what it’s like to fly your software in orbit,” says David Evans, ESA’s OPS-SAT Space Lab manager.

Over the last year, 12 project teams have had the chance to experience this first hand thanks to a combination of seed funding from the Discovery element of ESA's Basic Activities and access to ESA’s experimental OPS-SAT CubeSat.

SpaceX deployed 40 more satellites for OneWeb March 9 in its third and final dedicated mission for the British broadband operator, which is now just one launch away from having enough spacecraft to provide global services.