As Jean-Yves Le Gall takes the helm at French space agency CNES this month, he leaves behind a 12-year tenure as head of European launch consortium Arianespace, a legacy that began shortly before the 2002 failure of an Ariane 5 rocket left the launch vehicle's future in doubt. Since then, Ariane 5 has launched 54 consecutive times without failure from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, a track record unrivaled by U.S. rockets and one that has allowed Arianespace to capture more than half the world's commercial launch market today.

As U.S. defense priorities change, Lockheed Martin Space Systems is renewing a strategy that it has used for years: tapping into Silicon Valley's penchant for sharing ideas.

NASA's Chris Cassidy, newly arrived flight engineer on Expedition 35 to the International Space Station (ISS), is at the cutting edge of mankind's space endeavor as he uses the Minus Eighty-degree Freezer in Japan's Kibo lab module to store research samples. The work Cassidy and other station astronauts do in the coming decade is likely to shape how far, and how fast, humans will move into the Solar System.

Lower launch costs key to new space market's growth

An article on page 54 of the March 18 issue should have said the December 2010 launch failure that led to the loss of three Russian Glonass satellites was due to overfueling of the Proton rocket's Energia-built Block DM-03 upper stage, while a manufacturing defect in the Breeze M upper-stage helium pressurization system led to the loss of Russia's Express-MD2 and the Indonesian Telkom-3 satellites.

Budget cuts, plus new launchers and buses, could change culture

Lawmakers came up with a budget penalty bad enough to prompt themselves to deal with taxes and entitlements. Until now, the consequences of the $85 billion budget penalty known as sequestration were largely an academic exercise, but the looming closure of FAA contract towers is already making that tangible (see p. 18).

Satellite startup brings high-speed Internet to emerging markets