NASA is casting a wide net as it offers research opportunities aboard the U.S. segment of the International Space Station to small businesses, industry, academia and other governmental agencies for projects with the potential to advance technologies critical to space exploration. Those technologies include in-space propulsion, space power and energy storage, closed-loop life support, thermal control, robotics and telerobotics, and automated systems.

NASA visions underfunded, turning LEO over to commercial providers

NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) constellation is scheduled to receive its first on-orbit update in a decade on Jan. 30, sustaining the workhorse fleet as demands for its services continue to grow. TDRS-K, the first of three third-generation TDRSS birds, is scheduled to lift off at 8:52 p.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral on an Atlas V 401 with a 4-meter-dia. (13-ft.) fairing to contain the large, folded single-access antennas that deliver two-way high-data-rate service.

HUTCHISON HONORED: The Rotary National Award for Space Achievement Foundation has selected Kay Bailey Hutchison, who influenced U.S. space policy as a member of the U.S. Senate from Texas for two decades, as the 2013 recipient of the National Space Trophy. Hutchison, who retired in January, led efforts to designate U.S. elements of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory, opening access to non-NASA researchers.

Thirteen technologies are scheduled on five types of platforms

PARIS — European Space Agency Director-General Jean-Jacques Dordain says the agency will have a lot on its plate in the year ahead, with plans to loft 12 spacecraft atop eight rockets on a launch manifest that includes four fully operational Galileo navigation satellites and the European Union’s first Sentinel Earth-monitoring mission. “We’ve got a lot to launch and it is going to be difficult to get everything up,” Dordain said Jan. 24 at a press conference detailing ESA’s €4.28 billion ($5.7 billion) spending plan for 2013.

HOUSTON — Perhaps as much as NASA’s higher-profile commercial crew and cargo initiatives, smaller projects like UTC Aerospace Systems’ Sabatier Reactor System (SRS) aboard the International Space Station are helping to open new business vistas in space for the private sector.

PARIS — The launch of Europe’s Swarm Earth explorer mission atop a Russian Rokot is on hold as Moscow looks into the cause of a January launch mishap involving the vehicle’s Briz KM upper stage.