Launch

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has reportedly filed paperwork with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) on behalf of U.S. launch company SpaceX for the operation of 30,000 additional SpaceX Starlink small satellites, which will operate in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO). CNET was among the first to report on Tuesday that the FCC submitted 20 filings each...

Dymon signed a joint agreement with Astrobotic to send the first Japanese lunar rover onboard the Peregrine lunar lander to the Moon in 2021. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander will be launched on a Vulcan Centaur rocket from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The launch will carry the first lunar...

Firefly Black, the national security and civil space subsidiary of Firefly Aerospace, was selected by the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center’s Small Launch and Targets Division as a launch service provider for the Orbital Services Program-4 (OSP-4) Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract. Valued at up to $986 million, OSP-4 seeks to provide the...

The U.S. Air Force‘s Next Generation OPIR Geosynchronous Earth Orbiting (GEO) satellite program, commonly referred to as NGG, achieved another milestone by completing its system/ground and space vehicle Preliminary Design Review (PDR) on Sept. 27. Next Generation OPIR aims to provide a capable, resilient, and defensible space-based global missile warning capability against emerging threats, and...

Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) today revealed its role in supporting MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Agile MicroSatellite (AMS) mission. BCT will design, manufacture, and operate a 6U CubeSat the mission, which aims to demonstrate the potential low-altitude performance of CubeSats. Funded by the U.S. Air Force, launch is planned for late 2021. This first-of-its-kind mission aims to...

Northrop Grumman and its wholly-owned SpaceLogistics subsidiary sent the industry’s first on-orbit servicing satellite life-extension spacecraft, the Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1), into Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit (SSTO) on an International Launch Services (ILS) Proton Breeze M rocket, the companies announced Oct. 9. MEV-1 will dock to client vehicles in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) to provide attitude and...

International Launch Services (ILS) successfully launched Eutelsat Communications’ EUTELSAT 5 West B into super-synchronous transfer orbit using a Proton Breeze M rocket. The vehicle lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 3:17 p.m. local time on October 9. The separation of the satellite occurred after a 15 hour and 36 minute flight, and the spacecraft...

Astroscale entered the Assembly, Integration, and Test (AIT) phase of its End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration (ELSA-d) mission, following completion of design reviews and subsystem testing. ELSA-d, the world’s first commercial orbital debris removal mission to operate in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), consists of two spacecraft, a Servicer and a Client, and will demonstrate capture activities necessary...

Last week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave a presentation revealing the Starship test rocket, and discussed future plans of an orbital-flight launch targeted for 2020. Although there has been much talk of Starship’s ability to eventually carry out crewed missions, the rocket will also be used to carry cargo to Earth orbit. There are currently...

EOS Data Analytics (EOS), a space portfolio company of Noosphere Ventures, unveiled EOS SAR — a project to develop its own Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors intended for deployment in a constellation of microsatellites. EOS has more than five years of experience in developing data analytics products and cloud services for optical and SAR data...