North America

by Daniel Porras 2020 will be a year long remembered by anyone who lived through it, though maybe not for the best reasons. Between political strife, a pandemic and natural disasters, a person could be forgiven for thinking it was the end of days. But modern civilisation has not collapsed …

Paris, 28 December 2020. – The U.S. aerospace company Axiom Space builds a campus at the Houston Spaceport at Ellington Airport near Houston, Texas, the company announced. Axiom Space announced plans to create a 14-acre headquarters campus to train private astronauts and begin production of its Axiom Station—”the world’s first …

Paris, 28 December 2020. – Space Electric Thruster System (SETS), a Noosphere Ventures aerospace company, will undergo field testing in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) as part of the debut launch of the Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket, which is scheduled for the beginning of 2021 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in …

Join SpaceWatch.Global for an interesting and informative Space Café WebTalk featuring Doug Loverro, President at Loverro Consulting, Virgina, USA. This event will take place on 5 January 2021 at 4:00 pm CET. For decades the international community has tried, and failed, to achieve agreement on treaties aimed at preventing war …

Paris, 28 December 2020. – The U.S. Space Force and Japan’s Office of National Space Policy signed a Memorandum of Understanding to launch two U.S. payloads on Japan’s Quasi Zenith Satellite System. The Department of the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center is developing the payloads, which feature Space Domain …

by Ksenia Moskalenko On March 13, 1989 the province of Quebec, Canada suffered from a massive blackout caused by a geomagnetic storm. The solar activity led to a nine-hour clinical death of Hydro-Québec’s Electric power system, leaving people without TV, light and home gadgets, causing huge financial losses and halting …

by Prof. Pascale Ehrenfreund 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 Prof. Pascale Ehrenfreund, President of International Astronautical Federation.  2020 has been an unprecedented, difficult and …

Berlin, 25. Dec. 2020. – Dava Newman, an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics whose groundbreaking work has advanced human performance in space with the goal of interplanetary reach, has been named the new director of the MIT Media Lab, effective July 1, 2021. “Leading the legendary Media Lab is …

When wildfires broke out across northern and central California in August, a remote-sensing Earth observation satellite watched 381 miles (613 kilometers) above the planet’s surface. Built entirely in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), KhalifaSat captured imagery that could help governmental agencies and …

Paris, 24 December 2020. – While Europe mulls its own LEO, SpaceX taps the German market. The German federal telecommnunications agency Bundesnetzagentur authorized Starlink to use up- and downlink frequencies in Germany and offer satellite broadband internet, the agency said. “This is the first frequency allocation for a so-called satellite …