North America

The satellite radar specialist ICEYE can offer its customers now a coherent daily tracking and monitoring, the company said, providing what it calls the “world’s most frequent coherent radar satellite data coverage”. ICEYE announced the achievement of Daily Coherent Ground Track Repeat (GTR) imaging with its radar satellites.

The satellite imagery specialist Satellogic wants to go public through a SPAC merger, valuing the company at $850 million, the firm said. Satellogic is going public through a merger with Cantor Fitzgerald’s CF Acquisition Corp. V. Leading institutional investors participate in the transaction through private investments of $100 million.

SpaceWatch.Global is pleased to present the 31st episode in our podcast series The Space Cafe Podcast: Ian Carnelli, Preparing for the worst. Episode 031 features a special guest Ian Carnelli. Next year, a small spacecraft will head for the double asteroid Didymos to slam into it with its brakes off.

Join SpaceWatch.Global's Space Café "Law Breakfast with Steven Freeland" #04 series where global space law experts discuss the legal issues from everyday space activities. This event will take place on 22 July 2021 at 9:30 am CEST / 5:30 pm AEDT. Space Café "Law Breakfast with Steven Freeland" will analyse current space developments with a legal focus

Another SpaceX rideshare passenger last week was Tiger-2, a commercial 5G Internet of Things (IoT) satellite built and owned by 5G OQ Technology, a startup based in Luxembourg. Tiger-2 was successfully launched – together with 87 other satellites – aboard the SpaceX Transporter-2 rideshare mission, OQ said.

Space Race number two, more for Hollywood: the Russian actress Yulia Peresild and the American Tom Cruise compete to be the first to shoot a movie in space. In that race, it seems that the Russian star is in the pole position. The 36-years old actress and her director are planning to take off from Baikonur to reach the ISS in October.

Space Race number one: The founder of Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, will be his own first passenger and fly into space aboard his Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo (VSS) this week, on 11 July. Branson thus seems to be ready to beat Jeff Bezos who announced that he would get on board his Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, together with his brother Mark, for a flight on 20 July.

During this week’s Space Café, SpaceWatch.Global publisher, Torsten Kriening spoke with a Member of the European Parliament and member of the German Alliance 90/The Greens party, Niklas Niennas, about Europe’s role and response to the space race 2.0.

The global synthetic aperture radar (SAR) market size was valued at USD 2.21 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7% from 2020 to 2027, according to Grand View Research. SAR is capable of high-resolution remote sensing, independent of flight altitude, and independent of the weather. SAR has day and night imaging capability.

Update from the launch front: 29 out of the 88 satellites that SpaceX launched in its Transponder-2 mission were sharing the ride through Exolaunch, another 3 are from the European Space Agency (ESA), Exolaunch and ESA said, while OneWeb launched 36 more satellite for its internet constellation on a Soyuz rocket commercialized by Arianespace from Vostochny in Siberia.