NEW DELHI — India’s 101st space mission, the GSAT-10 communication satellite, will be launched Sept. 29 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the European spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana. “The 3.4-ton heavy satellite, GSAT-10, has been integrated with the Ariane 5 rocket along with Astra-2F spacecraft of SES as co-passenger for the launch Sept. 29 at 2:48 a.m. Indian time,” an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) official says. Astra-2F belongs to the Luxembourg-based leading satellite operator SES.

Advanced configuration may actually drive some innovation in the field.

TOO CONFIDENT: Analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) believe aerospace and defense executives may be “overconfident” in the information security practices at their respective organizations, given the trends of information security budget slashing, rising security incidents and accelerating technology development. The survey of more than 200 executives found that “72% of respondents are confident that they have instilled effective security behaviors into their organization’s culture, yet most do not have a process in place to handle third-party breaches,” PwC says.

The VTVL is a modified Falcon 9 first stage, part of ambitions to develop reusable booster to lower launch costs

Paris — Since 2009, the commercial launch sector estimates nearly $1 billion in new orders have gone to a single U.S. company developing a rocket that has yet to be flown. Over the past two years, Hawthorne, Calif.-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) proved its Falcon 9 medium-lift rocket can deliver unmanned payloads to low Earth orbit in two demonstration flights for NASA.

PASSING MUSTER: Loral Space & Communications says its proposed sale of spacecraft maker Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) to investors MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates has passed one regulatory hurdle. Loral says the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has “concluded its review and investigation” of SS/L’s sale and found there are “no unresolved national security concerns with respect to the transaction.” Still pending is anti-trust approval by the U.S. Justice Department. SS/L expects the sale to be completed in the fourth quarter, an official says.

Inmarsat expects that costs for satellite-based flight deck safety services, which airlines typically use for ACARS (aircraft communications addressing and reporting system) messaging in oceanic regions, will be 30% lower than its traditional services when the SwiftBroadband Safety Services option is approved for use in 2014.

The heavy-lift Space Launch System that Congress ordered NASA to build is ahead of schedule in some areas despite an austere funding profile, with hardware for the first NASA exploration flight test being machined and a critical design milestone coming up later this year.