After years of discussions, Canada’s Telesat and Loral Space & Communications will combine to form a new publicly traded Canadian company called Telesat Corp., the companies announced.

Virgin Orbit will make a second attempt to reach orbit with the air-dropped LauncherOne small satellite rocket on Dec. 19, with backup launch windows available later in the month in the event of a delay.

The space launch ambitions of the Shetland Islands have been given an additional boost with investment from a Scottish conservation fund, but the cash injection appears to have prompted a war of words between competing space ports.

SpaceX has marked its 100th Falcon 9 launch with a record seventh reflight of a first-stage booster, a mission that increased the company’s burgeoning Starlink broadband network to more than 950 satellites.

Following up on a pilot program to assess the value of commercially provided weather-forecast data, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has awarded data-purchase contracts to GeoOptics and Spire Global.

A week after sending its first space taxi to the International Space Station for NASA, SpaceX launched the flagship Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite into orbit to join spacecraft collecting key data for tracking climate change.

Supersonic business jet developer Aerion has teamed with satellite company Spire Global to supply the high-fidelity weather data critical to the aircraft maker’s goal of achieving Mach 1-plus cruise speeds without generating a sonic boom on the ground.

Newly emerged from bankruptcy, under new ownership and with a new CEO, OneWeb’s goal is  to resume launches for its global, high-speed internet-via-satellite service on Dec. 17, the company said on Nov. 20.