North America

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.

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.

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.

Paris, 22 April 2021. – Virgin Orbit will launch a series of six hyperspectral LEO satellites for the defense and security company QinetiQ and the geospatial analytics company HyperSat, Virgin Orbit said. Virgin Orbit will provide launch services for each satellite via its LauncherOne system. The first satellite will launch no earlier than 2023.

Paris, 21 April 2021. – European space experts call for a better control of space debris and regulation of space traffic, the Financial Times (FT) reports. The launch of thousands of new satellites in ‘mega-constellations’ to improve global internet access will exacerbate the growing problem of space debris, the FT quoted experts from a conference of the European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday.

Paris, 20 April 2021. – 9 times 5: Amazon contracted nine Atlas V rockets to launch its Project Kuiper broadband constellation, the United Launch Alliance (ULA) announced. With Project Kuiper, Amazon wants to increase global broadband coverage through a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).  

Paris, 20 April 2021. – 39.1 historic seconds: NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity succeeded to become the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. The Ingenuity team at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California confirmed the flight succeeded after receiving data from the helicopter via NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover last night.

Can regulation match innovation in a space race? 3 experts discuss  - The space race never ended. In fact, it just got a whole lot faster - Space engineering has always been a fundamentally future thinking activity, but in recent years mass investment in the industry coupled with technological development has been like a shot in the arm.

Paris, 19 April 2021. – China intends to expand its destructive anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon arsenal to target U.S. satellites, the annual report of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) concluded.„China has already fielded ground-based ASAT missiles intended to destroy satellites in LEO and ground-based ASAT lasers probably intended to blind or damage sensitive space-based optical sensors on LEO satellites,” the unclassified report published last week found.