PARIS — German aerospace center DLR is moving ahead with its Sharp Edged Flight Experiment (Shefex) hypersonic demonstrator, a project that aims to validate a subscale version of an operational reentry vehicle that could fly at speeds of Mach 20-24. DLR Chairman Johann-Dietrich Woerner says the agency was prepared to sign a contract Jan. 24 with EADS-Astrium Space Transportation GmbH of Bremen, Germany, to begin work on the €20 million ($26 million) project under an agreement that could culminate in a flight test by 2016.

HOT-FIRE: Orbital Sciences Corp. engineers are preparing for a static first-stage test of the company’s Antares liquid-fuel rocket next month, with only one wet dress rehearsal to go before the on-pad test at Wallops Flight Facility, Va. A month to six weeks after that test, the company plans to launch an Antares with an instrumented test version of its Cygnus cargo carrier. And if that test flight goes well, first flight of an Antares/Cygnus stack to a grapple-and-berth linkup with the International Space Station in May or June, depending on ISS scheduling.

John Shannon, the NASA human spaceflight manager who restored space shuttle operations after the disastrous Columbia crash, has joined Boeing as its International Space Station program manager. As the shuttle program wound down and the historic orbiters were prepared for museum display, Shannon oversaw secretive exploration-architecture studies in the headquarters Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) mission directorate. Some considered him a logical choice to eventually succeed William Gerstenmaier as the associate administrator for HEO.

DARK PARTNERS: NASA will join the European Space Agency’s effort to learn more about mysterious dark matter and dark energy in the Universe, supplying hardware and scientists to ESA’s planned Euclid mission. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory will deliver 16 advanced infrared detectors and four spares for one of the two instruments planned for Euclid, a space telescope designed to operate at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), following launch in 2020.

BEIJING — China estimates it will account for about 30% of the world’s space launches for the rest of the decade, more than doubling its recent launch pace, according to national space group CASC.

First systematic study of vision problems that have surfaced

HOUSTON — The International Space Station program is looking to a late March launch of a Russian Soyuz capsule with three crew as its first opportunity to demonstrate a much-abbreviated, four-orbit crew transfer to the orbiting science laboratory, NASA ISS Program Manager Mike Suffredini said Jan. 17. The planned March 27 launch of the Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft would carry NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin.

Deep Space Industries plans to launch spacecraft from 2015 onward