North America

In this session of Space Cafè “Moriba’s Vox Populi 10” Dr. Moriba Jah talked about What evidence constitutes harmful interference in space? with Michael Byers, Co-Director of The Outer Space Institute, Holger Krag, Head of the Space Safety Programme Office at ESA, Jinyuan Su, Professor at Wuhan University

This Space Café Scotland will feature movers and shakers from the Scottish Space Ecosystem in conversation with Angela Mathis, CEO of ThinkTank Maths and a friend of SpaceWatch.Global. "Building a Spaceport is more difficult than building a Rocket" - Angela Mathis in conversation with Frank Strang.

SpinLaunch has signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA according to which SpinLaunch will develop, integrate, and fly a NASA payload on the company’s Suborbital Accelerator Launch System. This will provide valuable information to NASA for potential future commercial launch opportunities.

Orbit Fab and Neutron Star Systems (NSS) established a cooperative agreement for co-development of satellite refuelling solutions with green propellants, NSS said. Under the agreement the companies will combine NSS’ propellant-agnostic electric propulsion technology with Orbit Fab’s refuelling interfaces and tankers. This will enable increasing the range of refuellable propellants.

Launch and space systems company Rocket Lab USA, has announced that it will attempt a mid-air helicopter capture of the Electron launch vehicle for the first time during its next launch, a commercial rideshare mission scheduled for 19th April with a 14-day launch window.

U.S. Space Command and the United Kingdom Space Command signed a Memorandum of Understanding concerning Enhanced Space Cooperation (ESC MoU). The agreement was signed at the 37th Space Symposium by U.S. Army Gen. James Dickinson, USSPACECOM Commander, and Royal Air Force Air Vice-Marshal Paul Godfrey, Commander of UKSpaceCom.

After an earlier issue with delays of gaseous nitrogen supply required for tanking preparations and resolving an issue with malfunctioning fans that caused the first wet dress rehearsal to come to a halt, the second attempt had to be cancelled halfway through as well. The Artemis I team ended Monday's attempt after partially loading liquid oxygen into the Space Launch System’s core stage tank.

Amazon announced it signed launch service contracts with three commercial launch companies, ArianeSpace, Blue Origin and ULA (United Launch Alliance) for 83 launches altogether over a five year period.  Arianespace will perform 18 Ariane 6 launches for Amazon’s Project Kuiper over a period of three years under the contract.

Lockheed Martin has released an open-source, non-proprietary interface to help standardize on-orbit docking. The company published the Mission Augmentation Port (MAP) interface standard online to support industry approaches to on-orbit servicing and mission augmentation, Lockheed said.

SpaceX launched its Transporter-4 mission carrying 40 spacecraft, including CubeSats, microsats, picosats, non-deploying hosted payloads, and an orbital transfer vehicle to deploy spacecraft at a later time. The rideshare mission was the rocket booster’s seventh successful mission.