Washington DC (UPI) Dec 17, 2020
SpaceX on Thursday postponed the company's second spy satellite mission for the U.S. government due to a slightly high pressure reading in an upper stage liquid oxygen tank on the Falcon 9 rocket. The countdown stopped at 1 minute, 53 seconds before the planned 9:45 a.m. EST liftoff from Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX said it plans another attempt Friday morning.

London, UK (SPX) Dec 18, 2020
A new gold standard national rocket test facility will soon open its doors, the Science Minister Amanda Solloway has announced 18 December. The new centre will allow UK companies and academics to fire up and test state-of-the-art space propulsion engines at up to 1.5kN in high-altitude vacuum, an equivalent test altitude of 140,000ft. It will cement the international reputation of the West

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.

Image: Heavy snowfall in the Alps has been recorded over the past weeks. The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission captured this image of the snow-covered Alps on 14 December.

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. 

Today, the ESA Council appointed Dr Josef Aschbacher as the next Director General of ESA, for a period of four years. He will succeed Prof. Jan Wörner, whose term of office ends on 30 June 2021.