The European Space Agency (ESA) and its industrial partners need more time to reduce the weight of the service module they are developing to fly on NASA’s Orion multipurpose crew exploration vehicle in 2017, a delay that will see the project’s preliminary design review (PDR) slip nearly one year, to May 2014.

HOUSTON — The capture phase of NASA’s proposed Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM) sparked great interest during a Nov. 21 workshop in Houston, with outside experts saying they want to shape a grand strategy to find and corral a 5- to 10-meter, 500-metric-ton near-Earth object for a journey to a stable orbit around the Moon, where it could be accessed by future U.S. astronauts.

Frozen igniter fluid lines were to blame for the failure of an upper-stage restart during the first Falcon 9 v1.1 launch on Sept. 29. Officials at Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), manufacturer of the rocket, did not detect the problem during ground tests because “ambient air kept the lines warm,” says Emily Shanklin, a spokeswoman for the company. It is unclear whether thermal testing was conducted. “We’ve added insulation and made sure that cold oxygen can’t impinge on the lines” in future missions, she says.

DARMSTADT, Germany — The European Space Agency (ESA) orbited its Swarm Earth-observation mission atop a Russian Rockot launcher Nov. 22, sending a trio of research satellites 500 km (300 mi.) above the planet’s surface to study the magnetic field that protects it from cosmic radiation and charged particles in the solar wind.

A growing number of satellite-based automatic identification systems (AIS) make it easier for maritime surveillance to tie ship-tracking data with high-resolution satellite imagery. Used with AIS, space-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical remote-sensing platforms determine not only the presence of ships, but their identity, position, speed, heading, load, size and type.

HOUSTON — Interrupted by the U.S. government shutdown in October, NASA’s Asteroid Initiative Idea Synthesis Workshop reconvened late Nov. 20 as a second opportunity to influence the agency’s efforts to resume U.S. human deep space exploration, while addressing the impact hazards posed by near-Earth objects.

BEIJING — China’s forthcoming DFH-4S satellite bus will introduce new technologies for the country’s spacecraft industry, including advances in avionics and batteries, and a plasma propulsion system (PPS).

Dennis Tito, the original space tourist who is staking a big chunk of his investment-fund fortune to send a man and woman on a hurry-up Mars fly-around in 2018, has concluded he needs NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) to do the job, with $100 million a year in upper-stage upgrades over seven years. Tito, who paid Russia for a Soyuz ride to the International Space Station in 2001, released the results of a mission-design study Nov. 20 that he said would keep the U.S. ahead of Moscow in what he couched as a potential race to Mars.