North America

A Minotaur II+ rocket exploded approximately 11 seconds after launch, Vandenberg Space Force reported. No one was injured in the explosion and the debris fell back onto the immediate vicinity of the launch pad. Investigation is currently underway to determine what caused the malfunction.

Mynaric and L3Harris signed an agreement according to which L3Harris will invest in Mynaric to gain 7.2% of Mynaric’s total shares and as a result widen the scope of their current collaboration to cover all domains including space, air, maritime and ground, Mynaric said. L3Harris will invest approximately €11.2 million by means of a capital increase

Airbus U.S. Space & Defense has been contracted to assemble, integrate, test, and launch 42 satellite platforms as well as provide space vehicle commissioning support services to Northrop Grumman to satisfy the U.S. Space Development Agency’s (SDA) Tranche 1 Transport Layer prototype constellation (T1TL) award, Airbus said.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave authorization to SpaceX to provide Starlink satellite internet services to vehicles in motion including boats, planes and trucks. Starlink’s low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation provides high-speed internet globally. The approximately 2,700 satellites are utilized by over 400,000 subscribers already.

Commercial space company, Sierra Space, the Turkish Space Agency and aerospace engineering solutions developer ESEN Sistem Entegrasyon (ESEN), signed a five-year Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) to combine efforts on Sierra’s low Earth orbit (LEO), lunar and astronaut programs, Sierra Space said.

The U.S. Air Force’s X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle Mission 6 is soon going to break its own record after conducting on-orbit experiments for over two years. The spaceplane has already spent 774 days in orbit, just 6 days shy of the previous mission record.

In this Space Café Radio - SpaceWatch.Global publisher Torsten Kriening spoke with Peggy Hollinger, international business editor for the Financial Times a few days after the FT Live Event "Invest in Space" about the conference, investment in space, a live call from the ISS, the situation at the ISS during the war times and about our sustainable future in space.

In this Space Café Radio - SpaceWatch.Global publisher Torsten Kriening spoke with Srinivas Setty, Head of SSA/SST/STM at GMV GmbH, Wessling/Germany, at the LEO Kinetic Space Safety Workshop in Lausanne about threats and risks in Low Earth Orbit and how to move forward to a sustainable future in space.

Virgin Orbit’s newly formed and wholly owned Brazilian subsidiary, Virgin Orbit Brasil, has been formally granted an operator’s license to allow LauncherOne launch operations in Brazil, said Virgin Orbit alongside the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB). The license allows for LauncherOne deployments from the Alcântara Launch Center as early as 2023.

NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) CubeSat, designed to test a unique lunar orbit, successfully launched on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. The spacecraft acts as a pathfinder for Gateway, NASA’s lunar space station supporting the Artemis program.