The promise that high-bandwidth satellites can bring fast, cheap Internet to the masses will be put to the test in 2012 as a new generation of Ka-band spacecraft enters service in the U.S. and Europe, with plans to expand into Russia, Australia and Latin America.

U.S. space-policy leaders remain divided over NASA's direction as President Barack Obama's first term winds down, with another slugfest between the White House and Congress over the agency's fiscal 2013 budget request likely this year.

For mobile satellite services provider Globalstar, this could be the year the Covington, La.-based company claws its way back from the brink.

Satellite operators see hopeful signs that their spacecraft eventually will play host to payloads supplied by cash-strapped governments trying to save a buck in today's tight budget environment, but so far concrete new deals have yet to materialize. In July 2011 Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, head of the USAF Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), set up a dedicated hosted-payload office (HPO) to look for military space missions that could take advantage of piggyback rides on other spacecraft, and to help develop and integrate the resulting payloads.

A sigh of relief swept the room last month at the European Space Agency's headquarters in Paris as top ESA and industry officials watched the signing of the 19-nation organization's largest and possibly most politically charged satellite contract.

Controllers are checking out the U.S. Navy's first Mobile User Objective System (MUOS-1) military communications spacecraft after its launch on an Atlas V, but it will be at least next year before troops can use its high-capacity new Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) payload for communications in motion.

In the 1990s the Pentagon was spending a lot of missile defense money on technology that could link its missile-launch warning sensors to “cue” the missile-intercept weapons it was developing. At the same time, astronomers worldwide were using the Internet and an instrument on NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory to cue their ground-based telescopes to gamma ray bursts virtually anywhere in the universe.

NASA will try to use its advanced technology programs to mollify planetary scientists outraged over the shutdown of the agency's ambitious plans to explore Mars in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA). That may help restore some calm, as long as the capabilities developed as part of NASA's new open-ended technology push advance scientists' stated need to examine Mars samples in laboratories on Earth. So far, it is not clear that the work that is just getting started will be able to do that.