North America

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.

NASA awarded fixed-price, milestone-based contracts of up to $45 million for commercial-led work on Moon landing services, the agency said. NASA is seeking to mature designs and conduct technology and engineering risk-reduction tasks for the human landing system (HLS), which will ferry Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back, the agency said.

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and Joint Air Power Competence Centre, we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and texts. We are pleased to present “The Role of Space Domain Awareness” by Captain Alessio Di Mare, originally published on the Joint Air Power Competence Centre website.

Only five months after it reached space in a test flight, Virgin Orbit successfully launched its first commercial mission, the company said. The mission called “Tubular Bells: Part One” was launched from Virgin Orbit’s modified Boeing 747, the “Cosmic Girl”, and with a two-stage rocket called LauncherOne

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and Joint Air Power Competence Centre, we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and texts. We are pleased to present “Outer Space, a Challenging Domain for Ambitious Defence Strategy” by Dr Anne-Sophie Martin, originally published on the Joint Air Power Competence Centre website.

The Australian launch services company Gilmour Space Technologies has secured a Series C funding round of €39 million from global investors, the company announced, bringing the company’s total funds raised to date to 87 million Australian dollars (€54 million), it said.

Airbus will place a dedicated Ultra High Frequency (UHF) military payload onboard Eutelsat’s 36D satellite to serve Europe’s and NATO’s armed forces, Airbus said. Military UHF satcoms are used by the armed forces for operations on land, at sea and in the air, Airbus said.

The Goonhilly Earth Station in the UK will support the Moon missions of Intuitive Machines (IM), the station and the U.S. startup announced. IM has entered a long-term agreement with Goonhilly to support every stage of IM’s missions to the Moon, Goonhilly and IM said.