Government/Military

Northrop Grumman revealed Wednesday that the company was awarded a follow-on contract under the Commercial Resupply Services contract-2 (CRS-2), which includes two additional NASA missions. Northrop Grumman will deliver a combined total of approximately 16,500 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) during these missions, and the launches will take place in 2023....

Ellen Stofan of the Smithsonian Institution will lead the NASA review team for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, the transition team announced Tuesday.  Stofan is the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. She was chief scientist at NASA from 2013 to 2016 and served as...

Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $258 million contract to develop a prototype payload for the U.S. Space Force’s Evolved Strategic Satcom (ESS) program, the U.S. Department of Defense announced Monday. ESS will be a military satellite communications system that will interoperate with, and eventually replace, the existing Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) system. According...

Executives from SpaceX, Telesat, Iridium and SES gathered virtually at World Satellite Business Week Virtual Edition hosted by Euroconsult on Tuesday, to discuss their different approaches with Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations. Telesat said it’s confident it will meet a buildout milestone to preserve its spectrum filings, and talked about the reality of SpaceX reaching its...

Telesat and the Canadian government have reached a $462 million (600 million Canadian dollars) agreement to use Telesat’s upcoming Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation to provide high-speed broadband across all of Canada.  Telesat announced Monday that under the agreement, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) will have access to a dedicated pool...

NASA has formally commented (PDF) on a request by a U.S. company to build a mega-constellation of satellites at an altitude of 720 km above the Earth’s surface, citing concerns about collisions. This appears to be the first time that NASA has publicly commented on such an application for market access, which is pending before the...

Viasat’s U.K. subsidiary won a U.K. Ministry of Defence contract to supply Ultra High Frequency (UHF) satellite communications on five new Royal Navy Type 31 frigates. Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.  Viasat UK Ltd., said in a Wednesday release that the UHF satcom will provide the Type 31 frigates with secure integrated...

SES Networks and Colombian satellite internet provider INRED delivered 300 additional broadband hotspots across Colombia, SES revealed Thursday. This is expansion of the work done in 2019 when SES Networks helped INRED deploy 1,000 free community Wi-Fi zones across Colombia, connecting more than 700,000 people. INRED is one of Colombia’s first certified partners for delivering...

Inmarsat has received a three-year contract with the ESA valued at $26 million (22.4 million euros) that will co-fund the development of a new satellite communications services platform that will allow governments to plan, procure, manage, and monitor satcom services. Inmarsat plans to create a platform called INVISON — International Virtual Satellite Operators Network.  The...

Exotrail revealed last Thursday that the French space agency CNES‘ mission design analysis and system engineering teams are now using Exotrail’s EXoOps – Mission Design software. CNES signed a software licensing contract for ExoOPS – Mission Design over the summer, which is available as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The product was released in March, and Eutelsat...