Government/Military

[Via Satellite 07-16-2016] The European Defence Agency (EDA) and the European Union Satellite Center (SATCEN) have exchanged letters to formalize their existing cooperation, in place since 2004. The letters establish a more structured cooperation, increasing the number of mutually pursued activities such as studies, workshops, projects and programs. The new enhanced relationship will also see...

[Via Satellite 07-14-2016] Procurement bureaucracy and Small Business Administration (SBA) regulations are discouraging small businesses from contracting with NASA, according to industry executives. Carol Craig, president and CEO of Craig Technologies in Cape Canaveral, Florida, told a Congressional House of Representatives panel Tuesday, July 12 that slipping timelines, unpredictable budgets, lots of paperwork and certification,...

[Via Satellite 07-13-2016] The Defense and Intelligence Systems Division (DISD) of Hughes Network Systems has completed successful operational demonstrations of its HM300 terminal. Designed for military applications, the HM300 is a portable X-Band communications system developed in conjunction with partners Airbus Defence and Space of United Kingdom and Tampa Microwave. During tests in December between...

[Via Satellite 07-12-2016] The U.K. Space Agency is investing $5.4 million (4.12 million pounds) in a national propulsion test facility. The planned facility will be based at Westcott in Buckinghamshire, allowing U.K. companies and academia to test and develop space propulsion engines. Westcott already has a long history of rocketry research for defense and space...

[Via Satellite 06-11-2016] The U.S. Navy reports that the fifth satellite in the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), successfully launched June 24 aboard an Atlas 5 rocket, has experienced an anomaly that required its transfer maneuver to be temporarily halted. MUOS 5 was projected to reach geosynchronous orbit and enter its test location 22,000 miles...

[Via Satellite 07-08-2016] The U.K. Ministry of Defence has renewed a contract worth $20.4 million (£15.7 million) with Airbus Defence and Space to provide the core WelComE welfare service to the U.K. Armed Forces until August 2022. WelComE services enable communications for service personnel. More than 132,000 service personnel have used the service, making more...

[Via Satellite 07-01-2016] More than 30 transactions by the Export Import Bank of America, commonly referred to as Ex-Im Bank, remain stalled out — a year since Congress voted to reauthorize the institution. Included in these 30 transactions, each valued in excess of $10 million, are new satellite orders caught in limbo. After the first...

[Via Satellite 07-01-2016] The European Space Agency (ESA) recently launched an Invitation to Tender (ITT) through its Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) program to encourage prototyping of low data rate satellite communications concepts that would be suitable for diverse Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. With this new funding opportunity, ESA is...

[Via Satellite 06-30-2016] Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) toward defining one or more Low Earth Orbit (LEO) space missions using the company’s Dream Chaser spacecraft. Dream Chaser is a reusable, orbital spacecraft designed to be a flexible “Space Utility Vehicle” (SUV) and...

[Via Satellite 06-29-2016] Raytheon recently completed its “Run For Record” test of the U.S. Air Force‘s Global Positioning System Next Generation Operational Control System (GPS OCX) Black Wide Area Network (B-WAN), which provides network connectivity to unclassified external interfaces for GPS OCX. The company completed component-level testing, which included mission capability and cyber controls, with...