Government/Military

OneWeb will acquire Texas-based managed satellite communications company TrustComm, under the terms of a definitive agreement announced by the two companies on Monday. The Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation operator said that the purpose of the acquisition was to open up channels to provide services to TrustComm’s U.S. government and enterprise clients. Financial details of the...

OneWeb has signed its first commercial services contract with Hughes Network Systems for the U.S. Air Force Research Lab (AFRL). Hughes is the prime contractor on the project, and will work with OneWeb to demonstrate managed Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications services to connect AFRL sites in the Arctic region. Financial terms of the deal were...

SES has recently announced details of two new deals, one in the United States and one in Germany. SES Government Solutions (SES GS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of SES, has won a $35 million Geostationary (GEO) satellite communications program contract in support of a major U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) combatant command. The solution includes a...

Vice President Kamala Harris will chair the National Space Council, the White House has announced.   “As I’ve said before: In America, when we shoot for the moon, we plant our flag on it. I am honored to lead our National Space Council,” the vice president tweeted on May 1, commenting on her role.  The National...

President Biden’s pick for NASA administrator — former Florida Senator Bill Nelson — was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on April 29.  Nelson becomes NASA’s 14th administrator, succeeding former Republican Congressman Jim Bridenstine, another political appointee. Steve Jurczyk has served as acting administrator since Bridenstine stepped down after the inauguration.  “I am honored by the...

York Space Systems is adding a larger and more powerful platform called the LX-Class to its family of spacecraft platforms.  The new platform is built off of the York S-Class, and reuses 90% of the S-Cass hardware and software design. Like the S-Class, it can accommodate a wide range of missions from communications to Earth...

The FCC has granted SpaceX permission to lower the altitude of future satellites in the Starlink Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation. The FCC’s decision, announced Tuesday, came despite protests from Viasat, Amazon, SES, and other satellite competitors.  The license modification allows SpaceX to change the altitude for 2,814 future Starlink satellites, from the 1,100-1,300 km range...

Just over a week after it lost out on a high-profile and lucrative contract to build the next spacecraft that would land astronauts on the moon, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin filed a protest over NASA’s decision, saying it was flawed. NASA awarded Elon Musk’s SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build the lunar lander, a huge...

Northrop Grumman will proceed with its Protected Tactical Satcom (PTS) rapid prototype program for the U.S. Space Force, with a flight demonstration set for 2024.  The program involves the space component of the Space Force’s Protected Anti-jam Tactical Satcom family-of-systems architecture to provide resilient, worldwide, beyond line-of-sight, anti-jam communications. In 2020, the Space and Missile...

SES and the Kazakhstan Government will explore rolling out satellite-enabled, high-speed connectivity services using the O3b mPOWER communications system to accelerate the nation’s Digital Kazakhstan project under the terms of an MoU agreement announced April 18. The MoU was issued by Kazakhstan’s Republican Center for Space Communications (RCSC), a subsidiary of the nation’s Ministry of...