Space Industry Analysis
Sep 03, 2012
SSTL expands potential for what smallsats can do in navigation, Earth observation and military applications.
Sep 03, 2012
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 with a Centaur upper stage lifted NASA's twin Radiation Belt Storm Probe mission spacecraft into orbit Aug. 30 from Cape Canaveral on a two-year mission to study high-energy particle fluctuations within Earth's Van Allen radiation belts. The $686 million mission is expected to investigate how the belts respond to solar activity and influence space weather. The two 1,400-lb. probes were developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as part of NASA's Living with a Star initiative.
Sep 03, 2012
Germany's aerospace industry has been growing, driven by civil air transport demand. But it is facing difficult changes as its defense-related business contracts.
Sep 03, 2012
William G. Purdy cautioned in 1966 that society was on a path where affluence and regulation threatened to choke off interest in “unorthodox inquiries.”
Sep 03, 2012
If Neil Armstrong had written his own obituary, he likely would have said he had been a test pilot, an engineer, an educator and one of the 400,000 Americans who helped land the first humans on the Moon. Less important to him was the combination of experience and lucky career choices that placed him as the first person to reach the surface of a body beyond Earth.
Sep 03, 2012
Multibillion-dollar prime contractors will not be the source of innovations critical to future aerospace and defense systems.
May 20, 2020
The U.S. Commerce Department on May 19 released a long-awaited new rule for the export of remote sensing services.
May 20, 2020
The concept of planetary protection—the prevention of life forms on other planets from infecting Earth and preventing terrestrial life forms from contaminating other worlds—has a long history.
May 19, 2020
Two days before he was to chair the Flight Readiness Review for the SpaceX Demo-2 mission, marking the return of U.S. human orbital flight capability, NASA Associate Administrator Douglas Loverro is leaving the agency.
May 18, 2020
NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility began a reopening May 18 for some mission-critical activities due to a decrease in COVID-19 illness reported in the New Orleans area.
May 18, 2020
Citing concerns about Tropical Storm Arthur, which was passing off the coast of North Carolina on May 18, SpaceX is standing down from its planned May 19 launch of a Falcon 9 rocket to build out its Starlink network, putting the long-awaited flight test of a crewed Dragon spacecraft next on the launch schedule.
May 18, 2020
BEIJING—China is likely to finish its Beidou 3 satellite navigation system six months before the original program target of the end of 2020, with the 30th and final spacecraft due to go into orbit next month.
May 17, 2020
After a one-day delay due to poor weather, the 197-ft. (60-m) tall Atlas V lifted off from Space Launch Complex 41 at 9:14 a.m. EDT to deliver an Air Force X-37B test vehicle into orbit for a sixth mission.
May 15, 2020
Virgin Orbit completed a second dress rehearsal of its LauncherOne small satellite launch system on May 15, but plans to conduct some additional testing ahead of the vehicle’s orbital test flight, targeted for later this month.