In June, Raytheon submitted proposals to the Air Force under the service’s FAB-T alternate program.

HOUSTON — NanoRacks, LLC, plans to improve astronaut training for its MixStix science canisters, to avoid a repeat of an activation failure involving 15 student experiments launched to the International Space Station in May.

If the Progress test is successful, a Soyuz crew may attempt the accelerated trajectory next year.

PARIS — British military demand for Skynet satellite bandwidth is expected to decline with troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, prompting Paradigm Services, a division of EADS-Astrium, to expand its commercial offering to include civil service monitoring and data collection for government and private sector customers.

The contracts provide $412 million to ULA for three Delta II launches and $82 million to SpaceX for a Falcon 9 mission, all from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., in 2014-16.

HOT AIR: This weekend NASA will test a large, inflatable heat shield aboard a suborbital rocket launched from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3) payload will travel through Earth’s atmosphere at Mach 5, or 3,800-7,600 mph, via a three-stage, suborbital Black Brant XI launch vehicle. After its flight, IRVE-3 will fall into the Atlantic Ocean about 350 mi. down range from Wallops. The flight is expected to take about 20 min. from launch to splashdown.

ISRO officials say a significant amount of work on the mission has been completed and scientific payloads have been shortlisted.

The extreme challenge of manned space missions drives terrestrial achievement as well.