Opinion

by Dr. Olga Stelmakh-Drescher and Prof. Steven Freeland Space Sustainability is the crucial requirement for a long-term and effective operational space environment. Being highly multifaceted, it has many interdependent and complementary constituent elements, facets and vectors – it is an enabler of continuous and unconditionally safe activities in space, as well as a driver of change as regards …

I am a student ambassador for One Giant Leap Australia and an Australian Air Force Cadet. I recently had the opportunity to attend Space Camp in the U.S.A.

On June 2019, NASA presented the Interim Directive for the use of the ISS for commercial and marketing activities, which makes available 5% of the agency’s annual allocation of crew resources and cargo capability for commercial non-R&D use.

SpaceWatch.Global asked its staff and contributors to review 2020 and provide an outlook into 2021. These personal reviews are being published during the holiday season. This is Joerg Kreisel, CEO at JKIC.

Space traffic management (STM) is an enabler for reliable, safe space operations – the real objective that the global space community needs to rally around during this unprecedented growth of space system deployments and growth in orbital debris. [See Endnote 1]

In the not-so-distant future, some country’s leader will be forced to answer the following question – will they passively allow the citizens and military forces of their nation to be targeted, with impunity, by the space forces of an adversary nation? 

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce (OSC) will finally get its chance to demonstrate to the rest of the space community its value-added in taking stewardship of civil space situational awareness and space traffic management, as was indicated in National Space Policy Directive #3, signed on June 18th of 2018. This will be through a Congressionally-mandated Space Traffic Management Pilot (STMP) program to develop an initial Open Architecture Data Repository (OADR). 

by Blaine Curcio SpaceWatch.Global asked its friends, staff and contributors to review 2020 and provide an outlook into 2021. These personal reviews are being published during the holiday season. This is the review of Blaine Curcio. Everyone would agree that 2020 was in many ways exceptional. There were vastly fewer …

Year 2020 was a year of many historical events. Taking Covid-19 aside, we have witnessed the launching of 3 missions to Mars and the return of samples from extraterrestrial bodies (Moon and Ryugu).

2020 will be a year long remembered by anyone who lived through it, though maybe not for the best reasons. Between political strife, a pandemic and natural disasters, a person could be forgiven for thinking it was the end of days. But modern civilisation has not collapsed (yet) and humans managed to carry on with their daily lives, meeting with friends and family online, ordering more take-out meals and adding to the list of indicators of an arms race in outer space.