North America

by Doug Loverro In the not-so-distant future, some country’s leader will be forced to answer the following question – will they passively allow the citizens and military forces of their nation to be targeted, with impunity, by the space forces of an adversary nation?  Will they countenance thousands of sailors …

by Raphael Roettgen Space financing finished 2020 on a strong note, with December being the third best month of the entire year, raising a total of about US$560 million, led by the US$375 million blockbuster round for China’s remote sensing company Charming Globe and the US$91 million round for German …

Paris, 4 January 2021. – The U.S. Space Development Agency (SDA) has awarded SpaceX a $150 million launch service contract, the agency announced. The Hawthorne, California-based firm has been awarded a $150,450,000 firm-fixed-price contract for launch services from Vandenberg Air Force Base for the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 0 Transport …

by Dr. Moriba Jah The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce (OSC) will finally get its chance to demonstrate to the rest of the space community its value-added in taking stewardship of civil space situational awareness and space traffic management, as was indicated in National Space Policy Directive …

Astrobotic’s CubeRover successfully completed more than 150 mobility tests inside a 120-ton enclosure designed to mimic the surface of the Moon. These tests will further inform the final wheel design of all three sizes of the scalable CubeRover line. Because CubeRovers are smaller than any rover that has operated on …

Join SpaceWatch.Global for an interesting and informative new format: Space Café “Black Ops by Ralph Thiele #02” on 14 January 2021 at 4:00 pm CET. Colonel (Ret`d) Ralph Thiele, Chairman of the Berlin based Political-Military Society, President of EuroDéfense-Germany, and Managing Director of StratByrd Consulting, Germany will discuss with his …

Join SpaceWatch.Global for an interesting and informative Space Café WebTalk featuringMahmoud Abu Wasel, Vice-President of The Hague Institute for Global Justice. This event will take place on 12 January 2021 at 4:00 pm CET. With the rapid increase in the private sectors race to space and governments attempting to keep …

by Blaine Curcio SpaceWatch.Global asked its friends, staff and contributors to review 2020 and provide an outlook into 2021. These personal reviews are being published during the holiday season. This is the review of Blaine Curcio. Everyone would agree that 2020 was in many ways exceptional. There were vastly fewer …

Paris, 31 December 2020. – The space exploration company Voyager Space wants to acquire a majority stake in XO Markets and its largest subsidiary Nanoracks, the company announced. Houston-based Nanoracks offers low-cost, high-quality solutions for satellite deployment and research in more than 30 nations worldwide. Voyager plans to invest “significant …

Paris, 29 December 2020. – Viasat raises “serious environmental concerns” about SpaceX’s intention to relocate nearly 3,000 Starlink satellites to lower altitudes, the company said in a filing to the U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) dated 22 December. In July 2020, Viasat filed a petition to deny or defer an …