HOUSTON — The six-person International Space Station is headed toward a resumption of normal operations following a pair of unscheduled late-December spacewalks by NASA astronauts to replace a degraded external thermal control system (TCS) pump module. The astronauts followed the excursions with other measures to restore cooling to all U.S. segment electrical systems deactivated in response to a Dec. 11 flow control valve failure.

Cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy spent a frustrating eight hours outside the International Space Station during a record-setting Russian spacewalk on Friday, installing then retrieving a pair of commercial Earth observing cameras that failed to provide satisfactory telemetry.The cameras, delivered aboard the Progress 53 resupply craft on Nov. 29, were developed for UrtheCast, of Vancouver, Canada which plans to offer near real time Earth views to subscribers through the Internet in partnership with Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency.

NASA's Mission Control has re-integrated a series of crucial internal heat exchangers with the external thermal control system of the six person International Space Station, following a pair of recent U.S. spacewalks to deal with the Dec. 11 failure of a flow control valve in one of two external ammonia cooling loops.

BRAZILIAN SPACE: Brazil’s Visiona Tecnologia Espacial S.A. has signed contracts with Thales Alenia Space and Arianespace to build and launch a civil/military broadband communications satellite for the Brazilian government’s Geostationary Satellite Defense and Strategic Communications (SGDC) system. Visiona, a joint venture of Embraer and Brazil’s state-owned telecommunications company Telebras, is to become a satellite integrator for Brazilian space agency AEB. Near-term, the company has been tasked with integrating SGDC under Brazil’s national broadband initiative.

PARIS — The European Space Agency (ESA) launched its €940 million ($1.3 billion) Gaia star-mapping spacecraft Dec. 19 after postponing the mission one month due to technical issues involving a component flying on another satellite already in orbit. Equipped with twin silicon-carbide telescopes built around a single, 1-billion-pixel focal array, Gaia is designed to survey a billion stars in the Milky Way, providing a precise 3-D map to better understand the galaxy’s composition, formation and evolution.

MUNICH — EADS Astrium has signed an agreement with Inmarsat to resell commercial and military broadband capacity on the London-based fleet operator’s new constellation of all-Ka-band Global Xpress satellites, giving them privileged access to the globally available mobile broadband network.

LOS ANGELES — Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are poised to push the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) suborbital vehicle to new heights and speeds during the third, and longest yet, powered flight test, which is planned for the coming days. The flight, from Scaled Composites’ Mojave, Calif., base, will be the most ambitious to date and is scheduled to include the first attempt at a supersonic re-entry using the vehicle’s tail-plane feathering braking system.

After sending the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to orbit atop a Soyuz rocket from the Guiana Space Center (CSG) Dec. 19, European launch services provider Arianespace confirmed the dates of its first two Ariane 5 launches in 2014.