News

Luxemburg, 26 April 2021. – Welcome to the ISS: the “first human spaceflight mission to fly astronauts on a flight-proven Falcon 9 and Dragon” docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday. The four Crew-2 astronauts had spent around 23 hours orbiting Earth before catching up with the ISS.

Luxembourg, 26 April 2021. – Rocket Lab builds a mission center in New Zealand for the climate monitoring satellite MethaneSAT, the company said. MethaneSAT is a satellite mission created to foster and accelerate reductions in the emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas responsible for at least a quarter of today’s planetary warming.

Paris, 23 April 2021. – The German Aerospace Center (DLR) wants to land a radiation detector on the Moon onboard Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander in 2021, Astrobotic said. DLR will send the detector to measure key radiation data on the flight to the Moon and on the lunar surface.

Paris, 23 April 2021. – Airbus Defence and Space will launch a small Earth observation satellite with Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum launch vehicle, the company said. “This constitutes the first major launch contract between an established space company and a privately financed European launcher company,” the startup said.

Paris, 23 April 2021. – Fresh wind in GEO: The European Space Agency (ESA) and Airbus completed the design of OneSat, a new standard of a software defined and fully reprogrammable satellite platform, Airbus and ESA said. The fully reconfigurable OneSat product line features major innovations and disruptive technologies, ESA and Airbus said.

Paris, 23 April 2021. – The UK startup Satellite Vu raised €4.16 million to launch “the world’s first satellite constellation capable of imaging the thermal footprint of any building on the planet every 1-2 hours”, the company said. The seed round was led by Seraphim Capital.

During this week’s Space Café episode, SpaceWatch.Global publisher Torsten Kriening had the chance to speak with space reporter, Theresa Hitchens. Theresa is a space and air force reporter at Breaking Defense, a digital magazine that reports on the strategy, politics and technology of the international defence sector.

In this week’s Space Café UAE  Sahith Reddy Madara, UAE’s National Point of Contact for the Space Generation Advisory Council talked about the Future of Aerospace Engineering. This Space Café UAE, held on 19 April 2021, was hosted by Abdulla A. Wasel, Managing Associate of Wasel & Wasel,

Paris, 22 April 2021. – Another breakthrough: NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance was able to extract oxygen from the Red Planet’s thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, the U.S. space agency said. “While the technology demonstration is just getting started, it could pave the way for science fiction to become science fact – isolating and storing oxygen on Mars”, NASA said.

Paris, 22 April 2021. – SpaceX and NASA are targeting tomorrow, Friday, 23 April, for the Crew-2 launch to the International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX said. Falcon 9’s launch of Dragon’s second six-month operational crew mission to the ISS is scheduled for Friday, with a back-up opportunity on Monday, SpaceX said.