Entrepreneurship

The European Space Agency (ESA) partners with the British Arqit – a leader in the quantum encryption field – to develop its quantum key distribution satellite QKDSat, the agency said. ArQit recently announced that it was merging with Centricus, a global investment firm, in a transaction expected to provide Arqit with up to €330 million in gross proceeds.

Lockheed Martin and General Motors join forces to design the next generation of lunar rovers, the companies said. “The new rovers will be capable of transporting astronauts across farther distances on the lunar surface.” They also "would be designed to survive and even operate in the two-week long night that sees temperatures of down to -280 degrees Fahrenheit".

OHB LuxSpace, a subsidiary of the space and technology group OHB, has signed a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop the Triton-X Heavy microsatellite platform, OHB said. Triton-X is a new line of microsatellites with a launch mass of up to 200 kg aimed at enabling affordable satellite constellations in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

The space computing startup Ramon.Space has raised $17.5 million in Series A funding, the company based in Palo Alto, California, said. The funding will be used to continue development of the company's computing solutions, support its rapidly expanding US and Israel operations, and expand the team globally, the company said.

SpaceWatch.Global is pleased to present the 28th episode in our podcast series The Space Cafe Podcast: Mahsa Moghimi Esfandabadi, Space Architect. What our habitats on foreign shores will look like. Episode 028 features a special guest Mahsa Moghimi Esfandabadi.

During this week’s Space Café, SpaceWatch.Global publisher Torsten Kriening spoke with Will Marshall, a scientist and the CEO and Co-Founder of Planet, the world’s largest Earth observation satellite network delivering a near-daily global dataset. It's at Planet where, for the past decade he has led the company in its development of advanced technologies

The number of space companies around the world exceeds 10,000, with more than half in the U.S., the magazine Forbes reported, based on a new analysis from SpaceTech Analytics. Competition has led the value of space companies to cross the $4 trillion mark, the report said.

NanoAvionics expands its U.S. manufacturing facilities and aims at taking “30 percent of the US market share in nano-/microsatellite manufacturing and mission provision services”, the company said. NanoAvionics existing facility Columbia will be used to produce “high-quantities of nano- and microsatellite buses, for both single and constellation missions”.

Iridium invests in the Scottish navigation service provider DDK Positioning, the Nasdaq-listed company said. Iridium has made a strategic investment in the Aberdeen, Scotland based provider of enhanced Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) accuracy solutions, the company said. DDK uses the Iridium network to provide global precision positioning services.

NASA builds a new Earth System Observatory to cope with climate change, forest fires and hurricanes and to support a “real-time agriculture”, the U.S. agency said. “With the Earth System Observatory, each satellite will be uniquely designed to complement the others, working in tandem to create a 3D, holistic view of Earth, from bedrock to the atmosphere,” NASA said.