News

The European Commission kick-started the €1.2 billion European Defence Fund and awarded €158 million to 26 projects and another €137 million to the Eurodrone and the ESSOR software project. The adoption of the first European Defence Fund (EDF) annual work programme paves the way to the immediate launch of 23 calls for proposals, the Commission said.

Update from the launch front: 29 out of the 88 satellites that SpaceX launched in its Transponder-2 mission were sharing the ride through Exolaunch, another 3 are from the European Space Agency (ESA), Exolaunch and ESA said, while OneWeb launched 36 more satellite for its internet constellation on a Soyuz rocket commercialized by Arianespace from Vostochny in Siberia.

NASA awarded fixed-price, milestone-based contracts of up to $45 million for commercial-led work on Moon landing services, the agency said. NASA is seeking to mature designs and conduct technology and engineering risk-reduction tasks for the human landing system (HLS), which will ferry Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back, the agency said.

Only five months after it reached space in a test flight, Virgin Orbit successfully launched its first commercial mission, the company said. The mission called “Tubular Bells: Part One” was launched from Virgin Orbit’s modified Boeing 747, the “Cosmic Girl”, and with a two-stage rocket called LauncherOne

The Shetland Space Centre is changing its name to SaxaVord Spaceport, the center said. The rocket launch site and ground station, located in the UK’s most northerly island of Unst, Shetland, is the designated site of next year’s UK Pathfinder launch by Lockheed Martin and ABL Systems.

The European Commission has selected ArianeGroup to participate in three space surveillance and early warning projects under the European Defense Industrial Development Programme (EDIDP), ArianeGroup announced. The projects are part of the “Space Situational Awareness and Early Warning” category of the defense program.

Rocket Factory Augsburg opened an office in Portugal near Porto, to increase its European footprint, the company said. With the inauguration of its Portugal offices, RFA signed a cooperation agreement with AICEP, the Portuguese Trade & Investment Agency, RFA said.

The Australian launch services company Gilmour Space Technologies has secured a Series C funding round of €39 million from global investors, the company announced, bringing the company’s total funds raised to date to 87 million Australian dollars (€54 million), it said.

Airbus will place a dedicated Ultra High Frequency (UHF) military payload onboard Eutelsat’s 36D satellite to serve Europe’s and NATO’s armed forces, Airbus said. Military UHF satcoms are used by the armed forces for operations on land, at sea and in the air, Airbus said.

The Goonhilly Earth Station in the UK will support the Moon missions of Intuitive Machines (IM), the station and the U.S. startup announced. IM has entered a long-term agreement with Goonhilly to support every stage of IM’s missions to the Moon, Goonhilly and IM said.