North America

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.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) have selected three design concept proposals for a fission surface power system design to advance space nuclear technologies, NASA said. The design could launch by the end of the decade for a lunar demonstration. The contracts are valued at approximately US $5 million each and will fund the development of initial design concepts.

Global communications company Viasat, received the necessary stockholder approvals for the proposed acquisition of global mobile satellite communications firm Inmarsat, Viasat said.  The offer for US $7.3 billion came last year, with plans to reach a combined annual revenue of approximately US $4 billion

Software startup Epsilon3 has raised US $15 million in a Series A funding round led by investor Lux Capital to expand its suite of space project management solutions, the company said. Epsilon3’s platform is web-based and provides spacecraft manufacturing and operations collaboration tools.

Our Space Café WebTalk “33 minutes with Jennifer Manner - The Critical Role of Satellite Networks in 5G and Beyond Ecosystems” took place on Tuesday, 14th June. Our guest was Jennifer A. Manner, a Senior Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at EchoStar Corporation/Hughes Network Systems where she is responsible for the company’s domestic and international regulatory and policy issues,