Beijing (XNA) Nov 23, 2022
At the UN/China space exploration and innovation partnership conference on Monday, the China National Space Administration raised eight issues in the keynote speech delivered by its deputy director Wu Yanhua, which should inspire anybody who has concerns about China's space program. China made clear, in no ambiguous terms, its basic principles about human space exploration, namely openness

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Nov 24, 2022
Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing Company, completed a Critical Design Review for the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command's Missile Track Custody, or MTC, program mission payload. "This initial CDR process marks 18 months of hard design work that is necessary to build the next generation of affordable OPIR sensors that can detect and maintain custody of emerging missile threats," sta

Boston MA (SPX) Nov 23, 2022
Researchers at MIT have made significant steps toward creating robots that could practically and economically assemble nearly anything, including things much larger than themselves, from vehicles to buildings to larger robots. The new work, from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), builds on years of research, including recent studies demonstrating that objects such as a deformable airplane wi

Houston TX (SPX) Nov 28, 2022
On the 12th day of the Artemis I mission, team members conducted another planned test of the star trackers aboard Orion as it continued along a distant retrograde orbit of the Moon, and began another reaction control thruster flight test. Engineers hope to characterize the alignment between the star trackers and the Orion inertial measurements units, both of which are part of the guidance,

Madrid, Spain (SPX) Nov 23, 2022
Airbus and ArianeGroup have signed a contract for the next transition batch of Ariane 6 large carbon fibre structures. The contract includes the manufacturing and supply of innovative, large, lightweight structures for the next fourteen Ariane 6 launchers, to be manufactured until 2025. The contract will support ArianeGroup's ramp up to full production rate by then. Airbus builds up to fou

With liftoff now scheduled for 13 December, Europe’s first Meteosat Third Generation Imager (MTG-I1) satellite has been fuelled – a critical and extremely hazardous milestone on the road to launch. Once in geostationary orbit 36,000 km above the equator, this all-new weather satellite will provide state-of-the art observations of Earth’s atmosphere and realtime monitoring of lightning events, taking weather forecasting to the next level.

Image: Shaun the Sheep astronaut portrait

Washington DC (SPX) Nov 26, 2022
NASA has awarded a contract to Honeybee Robotics LLC of Longmont, Colorado, for the Mars Sample Return (MSR) - Capture, Containment, and Retrieval System (CCRS), Earth Entry System (EES), and Spin Eject Mechanism (SEM). The total value of this cost-plus-fixed-fee contract is $17,686,341. The period of performance runs from Nov. 30, 2022, through July 30, 2026. Honeybee Robotics LLC w

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Nov 26, 2022
On 22 and 23 November 2022, the ministers and government representatives of the 22 member states of the European Space Agency ESA met at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in Paris to set the course for joint space programmes "made in Europe". The Council at Ministerial Level is the highest political decision-making body, which sets the content and financial framework for ESA's space programmes on ave

Tucson AZ (SPX) Nov 26, 2022
Phantom Space Corp. has been awarded four new NASA task orders to launch CubeSat satellites into space as part of the new VADR contract. NASA's VADR missions (for Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare) missions intend to meet the agency's needs for NASA payloads while also fostering the development of new launch vehicles from both emerging and established launch providers. V