Today marks the start of final assembly of the UK’s new National Space Propulsion Facility. ESA is providing technical oversight and financial backing for the facility, which is being equipped with state-of-the-art infrastructure to test the most powerful engines used to shift the orbits of space missions.

WASHINGTON — NASA has added New Glenn, the large launch vehicle under development by Blue Origin, to the list of vehicles eligible to compete for future agency missions.

NASA announced Dec. 16 it awarded a launch services contract to Blue Origin, adding New Glenn to its NASA Launch Services (NLS) 2 contract vehicle as part of an annual “on-ramp” process.

WASHINGTON — China’s leapfrogging advances in space are cause for national security concern, the head of the U.S. Space Force said Dec. 17.

“China has gone from zero to 60 really quick,” Gen.

SAN FRANCISCO – Shey Sabripour was first exposed to active phased array antennas while designing satellites at Lockheed Martin in the early 1990s.

At the time, engineers spent three to five years building a geostationary communications satellite that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to perform a specific job.

Press Release N° 33–2020

On Tuesday, November 17, Arianespace announced the loss of the Vega VV17 mission, which was carrying two payloads, SEOSAT-Ingenio, an Earth-science observation satellite for the European Space Agency (ESA), on behalf of Spain's Center for Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), and TARANIS for France’s National Centre for Space Studies (CNES). The first three stages functioned nominally until the ignition of the AVUM upper stage, eight minutes after liftoff. At that time, a degraded trajectory was detected, followed by a loss of control of the vehicle and the subsequent loss of the mission.

Solar Orbiter is getting ready for the first of many gravity assist flybys of Venus on 27 December, to start bringing it closer to the Sun and tilting its orbit in order to observe our star from different perspectives. 

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives passed legislation Dec. 16 to protect Apollo-era artifacts on the moon and to rename another NASA facility after the first man to walk on the moon.

The House passed on a voice vote S.

As the holiday season swiftly approaches, even our planetary neighbours are getting into the spirit – as shown by this perfect pair of festive silhouettes spotted by ESA’s Mars Express.