Elaborate dress rehearsals that unite astronauts, scientists and engineers on the ocean floor to test hardware and mission operations strategies.

XCOR Aerospace will use its planned two-seat suborbital Lynx spaceplane to train crewmembers for missions that the Excalibur Almaz startup hopes to fly to low Earth orbit and beyond with surplus Russian hardware. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding during the third Royal Aeronautical Society European Space Tourism Conference in London June 20.

NASA and Canadian ground control teams began the second phase of a satellite refueling demonstration

NRO LAUNCH: United Launch Alliance and the U.S. Air Force launched the National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO) classified NROL-38 satellite from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral at 8:28 a.m. EDT June 20 aboard an Atlas V rocket. The mission marks the second of four NRO launches scheduled to take place over a space of five months this year. The next is slated for June 28. Launch had been delayed from an earlier target of June 18 to allow for a valve replacement that required the rocket to be rolled back from the pad.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Boeing is considering additional layoffs this year in anticipation of a broad decrease in U.S. defense spending should legislators fail to agree to $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction and trigger an automatic budget cut known as sequestration.

Nav Canada and Iridium are partnering on a project that will bring satellite-based air traffic surveillance to areas of the globe with no coverage

SINGAPORE — Arianespace Chairman and CEO Jean-Yves Le Gall dismisses talk of consolidation among satellite makers. “In Europe there used to only be two main manufacturers of satellites,” Le Gall told Aviation Week June 19. “A few years ago people were wondering ‘When will they merge?’ The thinking was that it was better to have one rather than two, but then we ended up with three in Europe.”

PARIS — After several nail-biting weeks, the cross-shaped south solar array on the Intelsat 19 telecommunications satellite deployed on June 12. “We also deployed the communication payload antennas,” said Intelsat Chief Technology Officer Thierry Guilleman in an interview. “We are in good shape to enter into the in-orbit testing phase right now,” a process that will take 2-3 weeks, he says. The deployment occurred following four apogee maneuver firings on June 11.