Region

European leaders confirmed their ambitious plans to work closely together to accelerate Europe as a world leader in space during the 2022 Space Summit held in Toulouse, ESA reported. ESA, the EU and their member States will join forces to utilise the potential of space and to tackle urgent societal, economic and security challenges.

Brussels, Belgian satellite manufacturer Aerospacelab announced having raised €40 million in a Series B funding, co-led by Airbus Ventures and XAnge, a European investor in early-stage startups. Other investors include Octave & Miroslaw Klaba, SRIW, Noshaq, BNP Paribas Private Equity, Sambrinvest, and Belaero. Aerospacelab has raised a total of €60 million since its founding in 2018. 

In this session of Space Cafè “Moriba’s Vox Populi 09” Dr. Moriba Jah talked about space environmentalism, thoughts on the movie “Don’t Look Up” – its potential for outreach while also showing some scientific inaccuracies and what it will take for humanity to take action with

Orbex announced that Orbex LP1, the first rocket launchpad constructed in the UK for more than 50 years, is now in place at the Orbex test site in Kinloss, Scotland. LP1 was manufactured by a Scottish company specialising in marine and lifting equipment, the Motive Offshore Group. The new launchpad was built and tested to meet strict international standards.

The European Commission announced a number of initiatives in areas critical for defence and security within the European Union. These comprise the conventional defence industry and equipment on land, sea, air, cyber, hybrid and space threats. The Commission’s aim is to strengthen the Union's ability to counter fast-changing multi-layered threats.

SpaceWatch.Global is pleased to present the 48th episode in our podcast series The Space Cafe Podcast #048: Martin Wezowski, Chief Futurist at SAP - Thoughts for New Space. For all its glamor, enthusiasm and optimism, the new space industry has some serious homework to do. To have a future, what is happening in space now must not sound too much like the past.

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and the European Space Policy Institute, we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and briefs. This is ESPI Briefs No. 52: ‘European Space Summit 2022 – What is at stake? ’, originally published in August 2021.

There are currently more than 11,000 satellites in LEO and GEO, and only about 3,000 of those are active, this means that there are over 8,000 deactivated satellites. But space is booming, and in 2020 the world registered the highest number of satellites launched per year, with a record of 1,283 which represents 42% of all active satellites now in orbit.

Founder and CEO of Shift4, Jared Isaacman, announced the Polaris Program, a first-of-its-kind effort to rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities, while continuing to raise funds and awareness for important causes on Earth. The program consists of three manned spaceflight missions demonstrating new technologies, conducting research, and concluding with SpaceX’s first human Starship flight.

The first set of images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows that the spacecraft’s primary mirror is performing as expected as it initiated its seven-step alignment process of 18 individual mirror segments. The mirror segments need to work together as a single optical surface to produce high-precision images.