North America

In this Space Café Radio – on tour in Brussels at the 14th European Space Conference in the Egmont Palace, SpaceWatch.Global Event coordinator and Space Cafe Benelux Host Chiara Moenter spoke with Will Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Planet, about the European green space initiative, satellites in orbit and sustainability as company purpose.

Although the sustainability of all future space activities depends on the development of In-Orbit Servicing (IoS), there is currently no official or universal definition of IoS, sometimes also referred to as in-space services and on-orbit services. The European Space Policy Institute’s In-Orbit Services report mentions that IoS operations comprise mainly three activities

Intelsat announced that it has emerged from its financial restructuring process as a private company with a strengthened capital structure to support its growth in the satellite communications market. The company managed to reduce its debt from approximately US $16 billion to US $7 billion.

Rocket Lab USA has completed Pad B, its second orbital launch pad at Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand and the company’s third dedicated pad for the Electron rocket. The new launch site’s first mission will be a dedicated commercial launch for Japanese Earth-imaging company Synspective in four days, Rocket Lab said.

There are three types of commercial space ecosystems, the historic one, the self-created and the incidental.  The first one is exemplified by over 60 years of the United States space program, where government-funded missions gave life to private contractors that gained industrial expertise nowadays being used to supply end-to-end missions for public and private customers.

German real-time risk and disaster intelligence provider, Mayday.ai, and California-based computer perception company, Picogrid, formed a partnership for risk and environmental monitoring with mobile and AI-enabled sensors.  Mayday operates a platform that covers multiple disaster types and all geographic regions in real time.

In our next Space Café “Law Breakfast with Steven Freeland”, Host Steven Freeland, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Western Sydney University, Sydney and Professorial Fellow at Bond University, Australia, and Co-Host Torsten Kriening, SpaceWatch.Global’s Publisher, welcome Irmgard Marboe and Olavo Bittencourt Neto at the wonderful and cosy Café

NASA announced two opportunities to partner with the agency and help companies finalise the development of their technologies that could potentially be used for space exploration. NASA’s ongoing program, Tipping Point, supports space technologies that can advance commercial space capabilities and benefit future agency missions.

This Space Café WebTalk will feature Emmanuelle David, the executive manager of EPFL Space Center and Dr Minoo Rathnasabapathy, research engineer at the Space Enabled Research Group at MIT's Media Lab, in conversation with Torsten Kriening, publisher of SpaceWatch.Global. Rewarding safe and sustainable behaviour in space.

Research and development, technology service and consulting firm, Geometric Energy Corporation (GEC), announced it signed a contract with UK satellite and ground-support equipment manufacturer, Exobotics.  Under the contract, Exobotics will provide 12U CubeSat platforms and custom payload development services for GEC’s upcoming missions.