Asia Pacific

Indigenous Business Australia (IBA) provided the funding to construct two state-of-the-art commercial satellite ground stations in Alice Springs. The facility is the first development of its kind on Aboriginal owned land and transforms Australia’s capability in earth observation.

Airbus Defence and Space has won a contract for a fully reconfigurable telecommunications satellite from Australia’s second largest telecommunications company and leading satellite operator Optus.

OneWeb, the communications company whose mission is to bring connectivity to governments, businesses, and people everywhere, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with a consortium led by HMG (through the UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy) and Bharti Global Limited (“Bharti”) for the acquisition of the OneWeb business in connection with its court-supervised sale process.

Space BD is a space startup in Japan offering access to space using the International Space Station’s Japanese Experiment Module “Kibo”, the largest single ISS module, as well as with rideshares on Japan’s flagship launch vehicle “H3”.

In response to the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) have joined forces to use the collective scientific power of their Earth-observing satellite data to document planet-wide changes in the environment and human society.

Rocket engineers at Gilmour Space Technologies in Queensland, Australia, have completed the first in a series of major technology demonstrations this year: a successful 45-second ‘hot fire’ of their upper-stage hybrid rocket engine.

In this week’s Space Cafè WebTalk, Dr. Bleddyn E. Bowen, Lecturer in International Relations, Space Policy/Warfare Expert at University of Leicester talked about his new book War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics

The Japanese government held a meeting of its Strategic Headquarters for Space Development on Monday, where they outlined the country's 10-year basic space policy.

With only some US$34 million of space-related funding rounds, June sure looked like a slow month on the funding front, perhaps illustrating the time lag in Corona impact that we have previously discussed in this column.

NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) will unveil a dashboard of satellite data showing impacts on the environment and socioeconomic activity caused by the global response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic during a media teleconference at 9 a.m. EDT Thursday, June 25.