Asia Pacific

Give me five: The Japanese Earth observation startup Axelspace raised $24 million to fund a half of its planned ten satellite constellation, the company announced. Axelspace said it completed its series C funding round raising $ 23.8 million; the round allocates new shares to The Space Frontier Fund and several other venture capitals and corporate investors.

A historic step: China landed a rover on Mars on Saturday, making it the second space-faring nation after the United States to land on the Red Planet, China’s state media and the worldwide media reported. The uncrewed Tianwen-1 spacecraft landed on a vast plain known as Utopia Planitia.

The Chinese space sector has seen rapid commercialisation over the past 7 years, with well over 100 companies established and around ¥40B (US$6.5B) raised by commercial space organisations. While still only representing a small percentage of the US$35B in annual revenues of the country’s state-owned space industry giants,

This Space Café Australia will feature Dr Tim Parsons in conversation with Annie Handmer, a friend of SpaceWatch.Global. Mission to Planet Earth. Space is often framed as being outward-looking; about exploration, pushing boundaries, and crossing new frontiers.

Scorpio Shipmanagement equips its entire tanker and bulker fleet and connects its vessels with Marlink’s hybrid VSAT network solution, the company based in Oslo and Monaco said. The service extension will provide Scorpio with higher bandwidth services to meet an increasing level of business need for higher data rates and usage volumes.

One interesting development in the space sector is the rise of artificial intelligence. AI has long played an important role in space missions, and its role only continues to grow. But as AI becomes more central to humanity’s engagement with space, it raises legal and ethical challenges. Space law is well poised to respond to these challenges.

The Japanese startup Space BD works for JAXA, the space agency, on a protein experiment on board the International Space Station (ISS). Space BD utilizes the microgravity environment of ISS to grow high-quality protein crystals that are difficult to achieve on the ground.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup! A special shout-out to our friends at GoTaikonauts!, and at SpaceWatch.Global, both excellent sources of space industry news. Without further ado, the news update from the week of 3 May - 9 May 2021.

Women in space: a senior officer of the Australian Royal Air Force, Catherine Roberts, will become the country’s Space Division new chief next year, Australian ABC News reported. Air Vice-Marshal Catherine Roberts, who is currently the Head of Air Force Capability, will take over the newly created position of Head of Space Division from January, ABC said.

Debris from the Chinese Long March 5B rocket that brought the country’s space station to orbit crashed into the Indian Ocean north of Maldives, U.S. and Chinese officials said. The huge piece of space junk made an uncontrolled re-entry back into Earth's atmosphere over the Arabian Peninsula Saturday night.