WenchangBeijing (XNA) Apr 13, 2021
China's Long March-7 Y3 rocket, which will launch the cargo craft of China's space station, has arrived at its launch site in southern China's Hainan Province. The rocket, alongside the Tianzhou-2 cargo craft that has already been transported to the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site, will be assembled and tested at the launch site, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) said on Mo

SAN FRANCISCO — Orbital Sidekick announced a $16 million Series A funding round April 13 led by Singapore investment giant Temasek that clears the way for the company to complete development of its first constellation of hyperspectral imaging satellites.

WASHINGTON — A test flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle, scheduled for as soon as April 14, will be a dress rehearsal for long-awaited crewed flights.

Blue Origin said April 12 that it will perform “astronaut operational exercises” before and after the flight of the vehicle at the company’s West Texas test site.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s Space Development Agency wants to hear from satellite manufacturers about their capabilities to support the agency’s plans to deploy a large network of spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. 

SDA in a request for information issued April 10 asks companies that intend to compete for an upcoming contract to confirm that they will be able to meet specific technical requirements.

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency selected Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin to develop competing spacecraft concepts for a demonstration of nuclear thermal propulsion, the agency announced April 12.

Under a program called DRACO, short for demonstration rocket for agile cislunar operations, DARPA wants to demonstrate nuclear thermal propulsion technology — using a nuclear reactor to heat up rocket fuel to generate thrust.

TAMPA, Fla. — Northrop Grumman’s MEV-2 satellite servicer successfully docked April 12 with Intelsat’s in-orbit 10-02 spacecraft.

The maneuver was completed at 1:34 p.m. Eastern, marking the first time a satellite servicer has docked with an in-service commercial satellite in geosynchronous orbit (GEO).

WASHINGTON — The Atlantic Council, an international security think tank, released a 100-page report that calls on the United States and allies to advocate for new global rules for safe activities in outer space.

SAN FRANCISCO – L3Harris Technologies and Raytheon Intelligence & Space won NASA contracts to carry forward studies of next-generation imagers for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geostationary and Extended Orbits (GEO-XO) satellites.

The one-year, firm-fixed price contracts worth about $6 million apiece set the stage for the two weather sensor leaders to compete to build infrared and visible-imaging instruments for the NOAA satellites to follow the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite R (GOES-R) series.

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On 20 April 2021, ESA will host the 8th European Conference on Space Debris from Darmstadt, in Germany. Scientists, engineers, industry experts and policy makers will spend the virtual four day conference discussing the latest issues surrounding space debris. They will exchange the latest research, try to come up with solutions for potential problems and define the future direction of any necessary action.

There are currently over 129 million objects larger than a millimetre in orbits around Earth. These range from inactive satellites to flakes of paint. But no matter how small the item of debris, anything travelling up

Chicago IL (SPX) Apr 08, 2021
The long-awaited first results from the Muon g-2 experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory show fundamental particles called muons behaving in a way that is not predicted by scientists' best theory, the Standard Model of particle physics. This landmark result, made with unprecedented precision, confirms a discrepancy that has been gnawing at researchers