Space for Earth News

On the 1st of June following the opening session of  the European Navigation Conference (ENC) the main procurement batch of Galileo Second Generation initiated last summer has been finalised. The system is ready for its In Orbit Validation development phase.

Pixxel has announced $36 Million in a Series B funding round with participation from new investors such as Google, along with existing investors Radical Ventures, Lightspeed, Blume Ventures, growX, Sparta, and Athera. The new funds will advance Pixxel’s mission to build the world’s first and highest-resolution hyperspectral satellite constellation, delivering actionable climate insights on a planetary scale. It will also help further the development of Aurora: Pixxel’s AI-powered analytics platform to make hyperspectral analysis accessible for everyone.

In this  Space Café Radio - SpaceWatch.Global Editor in Chief Dr. Emma Gatti spoke with Savino Ruà,  International Relations Officer at DG DEFIS (European Commission) and  Cecilia Donati, Policy Officer Digital and Space for Development at DG INTPA (European Commission) about the recent NewSpace Africa Conference 2023, which took place in Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, between the 26th and 27th of April 2023.

In this  Space Café Radio - SpaceWatch.Global publisher Torsten Kriening spoke with Kristina Nikolaus, CEO & Co-Founder at OKAPI:Orbits,  at the 14TH IAA SYMPOSIUM ON SMALL SATELLITES FOR EARTH SYSTEM OBSERVATION, organized by the German Aerospace Center, Institute for Solar-Terrestrial Physics, TU Berlin and Berlin Partners in May 2023 in Berlin.

Satellite Vu, the UK climate tech company, has announced its Series A2 of £12.7m, bringing its total investment to £30.5m in Venture Capital funding. The funding will help the Company accelerate its mission to provide sustainable solutions to global issues. Molten Ventures led the round, with participation from Seraphim Space Investment Trust PLC, A/O Proptech, Lockheed Martin, Ridgeline Ventures, Earth Sciences Foundation, and Stellar Ventures - all existing investors.

The European Council has adopted conclusions on the ‘Fair and sustainable use of space’, which includes a call for a European approach to space traffic management at a time when orbits are increasingly congested with space objects.

OneWeb and Arctic Space Technologies have announced a leap forward in the construction of the OneWeb Satellite Network Portal (SNP), a hyperscale satellite ground station installation at the Arctic Space Technologies’ Space Center in Piteå. The companies signed a bilateral agreement in December of 2022 and have now finalized the detailed design work as well as obtained all approvals for the construction of the SNP. As a result,  the agreement will see the installation and operationalization of 27 satellite tracking antennas by Q3 2023.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and ICEYE have signed a letter of intent to empower entrepreneurship and encourage the development of commercially viable and sustainability-minded space solutions. The collaboration falls under the ESA Partnership Initiative for Commercialization (EPIC) and targets companies which the ESA Business Incubation Centers (ESA BICs), ESA Technology Brokers and ESA Φ-labNET support. 

Rocket Lab USA, Inc. has successfully completed the second of two dedicated Electron launches to deploy a constellation of tropical cyclone monitoring satellites for NASA. The "Coming To A Storm Near You" launch lifted-off on May 26 at 15:46 NZST (03:46 UTC) from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula, deploying the final two CubeSats of NASA’s TROPICS constellation to orbit.

On Thursday, the 25th of May, GLOC2023, Global Space Conference on Climate Change, the first Space conference entirely dedicated to Climate Change closed it’s first edition in Oslo, Norway's capital city. One of the major takeaway points was the need to make data more accessible. “People who work in crucial and critical data should be able to use the data freely,” says Dr Emma Gatti, Editor-in-Chief at SpaceWatch.Global.