Mikhail Kokorich resigns his CEO position in Momentus Space
Mikhail Kokorich has had to resign as his company develops dual-use technologies that can be used in civil and military spheres. The US government wants to keep them restricted from foreign access. As the details became known, Mikhail Kokorich the Russian founder and CEO of the American space startup Momentus Space resigned following publication of materials proving his illegitimate involvement in secret space technologies. Former Tomnod CEO joins Spire Global to lead aviation unit
SAN FRANCISCO – Shay Har-Noy, former Tomnod founder and CEO, has joined Spire Global as the company’s general manager of the aviation systems business unit.
Har-Noy has been acutely aware of aviation’s need for satellite data since 2014 when Tomnod enlisted the help of more than 10 million people to tag oil slicks, wreckage and rafts in satellite data in an effort to locate Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared with 239 passengers and crewmembers.
Cloud computing services changing the calculus for space startups
WASHINGTON — The cloud computing industry is developing new products and services aimed at space companies that want to monetize data without having to invest in infrastructure, executives said Feb. 8 at the SmallSat Symposium.
ESA’s Solar Orbiter ducks behind the Sun
What happens when the Solar System's No. 1 source of violent energy interferes with spacecraft communication?
Industry still sees strong demand for smallsat launch services
WASHINGTON — While some see a surge of launch vehicle development efforts as a sign of an “overheated” market, others see those efforts as a sign of shifting demand.
At a Feb. 4 webinar, Tory Bruno, chief executive of United Launch Alliance, said he was concerned that too much investment was going into launch companies, creating capabilities that were driving down prices but not stimulating demand.
Richard Shelby, senator with major influence over NASA, to retire
WASHINGTON — Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), an influential senator who has long been an advocate for some NASA programs and critic of others, announced Feb. 8 he will not run for reelection next year.
Shelby said in a statement that he would not seek a seventh term in the Senate in 2022.
Millie Hughes-Fulford, trailblazing astronaut, dies at 75
Millie Hughes-Fulford, a trailblazing astronaut and scientist who became the first female payload specialist to fly in space for NASA, died following a yearslong battle with cancer, her family said. She was 75.
Hughes-Fulford was selected by NASA for its astronaut program in 1983 and five years later, in June 1991, spent nine days in orbit on the shuttle Columbia, conducting experiments on the effect of space travel on humans as part of the agency's first mission dedicated to biomedical studies, STS-40. She and her crew mates circled the Earth 146 times.
The research shaped the rest of her career and upon her return she established the Hughes-Fulford Laboratory at the San Francisco VA Healthcare System, which worked to understand the mechanisms that regulate cell growth in mammals.
"She came back to her world as a scientist and carried this experience of having flown in space and that became a unique filter through which she passed all of her scientific work," said Dr. Mike Barratt, a NASA flight surgeon assigned to Columbia, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
The laboratory was active right up through Hughes-Fulford's own seven-year battle with lymphoma. She died Feb. 2, at her San Francisco home. Her death was confirmed by her granddaughter, Kira Herzog of Mill Valle.
Arab spacecraft closes in on Mars on historic flight
A spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates was set to swing into orbit around Mars in the Arab world's first interplanetary mission Tuesday, the first of three robotic explorers arriving at the red planet over the next week and a half.
The orbiter, called Amal, Arabic for Hope, traveled 300 million miles in nearly seven months to get to Mars with the goal of mapping its atmosphere throughout each season.
A combination orbiter and lander from China is close behind, scheduled to reach the planet on Wednesday. It will circle Mars until the rover separates and attempts to land on the surface in May to look for signs of ancient life.
A rover from the U.S.
Keeping it fluid
Image:
NASA astronaut Victor Glover installs the Fluid Dynamics in Space experiment, or Fluidics for short. Fluidics is the black cylinder pictured in the foreground of the European Columbus module of the International Space Station.
Developed by French space agency CNES and co-funded by Airbus, the Fluidics experiment is probing how fluids behave in weightlessness.
The experiment is made up of six small, transparent spheres housed in the black centrifuge seen here and is studying two phenomena.
The first is ‘sloshing’ or how liquids move inside closed spaces, which is hard to predict both with and without gravity. Think how
Op-ed | Space weather bill will fizzle without funding
On Oct. 21, 2020, the Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow (PROSWIFT) Act was signed into law. This act culminates a multiyear bipartisan effort championed by Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.
