Opinion

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and Dr. Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and texts. This is "How India is catching up with China with the launch of Chandrayaan-2", originally published 22 July 2019.

It was a spectacle, perhaps one of the greatest ever to be hosted on the National Mall.  Projecting the pictorial narrative of what many, including this author, consider to be humankind’s greatest achievement onto the Washington Monument was a stroke of genius. 

Last March, Secure World Foundation was pleased to announce the inaugural Summit for Space Sustainability, to be held in Washington, DC on June 25-26, 2019. Our creation of the Summit was driven by the rapid growth in both the number and diversity of space actors, the emergence of new kinds of space activities, and the resulting space sustainability challenges posed by these developments.

Very few things inspire quite like space, and this has been exemplified during the first year of the Australian Space Agency.

Project Ploughshares Program Officer Jessica West in conversation with Michelle Hanlon, cofounder of For All Moonkind about Preserving peace through Moon culture

The adoption of the Long Term Sustainability (LTS) Guidelines “is the most significant output of COPUOS [Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space] in the last decade, and the most significant output promoting space sustainability,”

On Friday 31st May 2019, almost 100 university students and young professionals huddled excitedly inside the Sir Alexander Fleming building of Imperial College London with the hope of expanding their horizons - and their networks.

Europe has never landed on the Moon. PTScientists is preparing to change that by sending the first European lunar lander to the Apollo 17 site. But, perhaps equally important – PTScientists want to prove that Europe can be a fertile ground for companies striving to be at the forefront of lunar exploration, and that it is not a prerequisite for success to be based in the United States or Asia. However, this is not a feat we can accomplish independently, and Europe needs to make a commitment to lunar exploration now – or be left behind.

The first half of 2019 has already proven to be a worthy time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon. With China’s Chang'e-4 mission to the far side of the Moon in January and its proactive approach to create a permanent Moon Base, Israel’s private lunar mission in February – which has paved the way for commercial lunar missions, India’s very first mission to the south pole, expected to be launched in September, and NASA’s U.S.$2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Service program and the American ambitions to send humans back to the Moon by 2024, the Moon race is on.

There are thousands of dedicated space professionals in the UK, who, between them, have established a world-class reputation in space science, commercial space and engineering, and in certain national security space operations.