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In this Space Café Radio - SpaceWatch.Global publisher Torsten Kriening spoke with Peter Garretson,  Senior Fellow in Defense Studies with the American Foreign Policy Council and co-director if its Space Policy Initiative, and host of the Space Strategy Podcast.  He was previously the director of Air University’s Space Horizons Task Force, an Air Force think tank for space, and was a founder and deputy director of the U.S. Space Force’s Schriever Scholars Strategy Seminar, America’s premier military space strategy program.

Share My Space, the French space surveillance and operations safety startup, has signed a contract with Airbus Defense and Space. Through this contract, Airbus will assess Share My Space’s optical data's ability to improve collision alert's reliability and overall risk management practice in low earth orbit (LEO).

OffWorld has expanded into Luxembourg, appointing a former ispace CEO, Kyle Acierno, to run its European HQ. With its headquarters in Pasadena, California, OffWorld was founded in 2016 to reinvent the mining, manufacturing, and construction industries by developing a new generation of AI-powered robots able to withstand extreme conditions. It is now adapting its technology for the mining of resources in space.

Airbus Defense and Space has announced an agreement for Angeo-1, the first very high-performance Angolan Earth observation satellite, which it will develop in France. Furthermore, the agreement will strengthen the collaboration between the two countries. As part of the partnership, Airbus will offer a comprehensive training program for Angolan engineers to build domestic competencies through targeted knowledge transfer.

The Arianespace and ESA-set up independent inquiry commission has disclosed its conclusions on the reasons for the loss of the Vega-C VV22 mission after its launch in French Guiana on Tuesday, 20 December 2022. According to the Commission, after the nominal functioning of the Vega-C first stage P120C and nominal ignition of the second stage (Zefiro 40), a progressive decrease in the chamber pressure 151 seconds after lift-off led to the loss of the mission.

The past four weeks have been eventful for the US Air Force. On Wednesday, February 1st 2023 an unknown floating balloon, the size of three school buses, was spotted flying over Billings, Montana, at around 18 km above the ground. On Friday, February 3rd, Mao Ning, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Foreign Minister’s spokesperson, released a note claiming that the airship was  “of a civilian nature, used for scientific research such as meteorology. Affected by the westerly wind and its control ability is limited, the airship seriously deviated from the scheduled route. China regrets that the airship strayed into the United States due to force majeure”.

Spaceflight Inc. has announced it will launch two BlackSky satellites aboard Rocket Lab’s next mission called “The Beat Goes On,” from Mahia, New Zealand. U.S.-based satellite maker LeoStella manufactured the satellites, which are now in New Zealand for the final stage of integration, with co-engineering from with BlackSky. The two spacecraft onboard the mission will be the 15th and 16th satellites in BlackSky’s growing constellation.

INNOSPACE has announced that it has set a new launch window from March 7 to March 21 (Brasilia Time, BRT) for the HANBIT-TLV first test flight from Brazil soil. The test will verify the flight performance of the 15-ton thrust single-stage hybrid engine from INNOSPACE.

Two Germany NewSpace companies - constellr, a technology company enabling space-based water, temperature and carbon measurement for the agricultural sector, and Exolaunch, a global provider of launch, deployment and in-space logistics services, have announced the signing of the multi-launch agreement (MLA) for constellr’s high precision versatile ecosphere monitoring (HiVE) microsat constellation. 

ESA’s Earth Explorer Biomass satellite has undergone testing to ensure it will survive liftoff and deploy its solar array correctly. Having passed these tests successfully Biomass is closer to its mission in orbit: to deliver new information on our forests and the carbon they store.