Government/Military

NovelSat will incorporate its satellite access waveforms into Envistacom’s Transport Virtualization Ecosystem (TVE). Envistacom announced Thursday it will deliver an open-architecture ecosystem which helps enable virtualized applications such as advanced communications waveforms, encryption, data analytics, and other real-time continuous processing applications to reside in Common off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware. The Envistacom/NovelSat partnership helps allow commercial and...

The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected Airbus Defence and Space for major Copernicus environment missions, the agency announced Wednesday. Copernicus is the biggest provider of Earth Observation (EO) data in the world, and ESA develops, builds and launches the satellites. It also operates some of the missions and ensures the availability of data from...

NASA and Boeing’s major reviews of the company’s uncrewed Orbital Flight Test in December 2019 has concluded with 80 recommendations. The December flight test experienced an intermittent space-to-ground communication issue, and the spacecraft was not able to execute the orbital insertion burn required to meet its testing objective of docking with the International Space Station...

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has recently awarded Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc. approximately $30 million in contract awards for Command, Control, Computing, Communication, Combat, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Systems. These awards are focused primarily on missile defense related combat systems for U.S. national security.  “We believe that these recent contract awards...

The U.S. Air Force’s collaboration with Texas-based Hypergiant Industries will to lead to a Chameleon Constellation of 24 to 36 Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) enabled cube satellites able to be re-tasked for national security and other missions within minutes. Air Force small business innovation research grants are funding the program, which Hypergiant proposed...

L3Harris Technologies has launched a satellite that is the latest in a demonstration series of end-to-end small satellites for a classified U.S. Air Force constellation. A representative for the company said Monday that limited details about the launch can be provided because the program is classified.  L3Harris said in a Monday release that as the...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued four, six-month contracts to Ball Aerospace for studies related to mission, spacecraft, and instrument concepts for future operational weather architectures and Earth Observation (EO) capabilities. The five study contracts include: the Auroral Imager in Tundra project that Ball is working on with Computational Physics; the Ball Operational...

PredaSAR is working to build a constellation of 48 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, and the company’s Executive Chairman and Co-Founder Marc Bell said the Earth Observation (EO) startup will start commercial operations with satellites on-orbit as early as next year.  In a recent conversation with Via Satellite, Bell said PredaSAR’s satellites were in production...

Hispasat revealed on June 24 that it won a contract with Artel to embed the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center’s Pathfinder 2 mission on its Amazonas Nexus Satellite, which is expected to be launched in mid-2022. The project is led by Artel and Hunter Communications, a satellite communication solutions provider. This is...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has selected L3Harris Technologies to conduct four studies on the agency’s next generation of Earth Observation (EO) satellite architecture. The studies will assess mission concepts, spacecraft, and instruments. L3Harris supplies operational weather sensors for U.S. and international spacecraft. The company is developing NOAA’s Advanced Baseline Imager for the...