Entrepreneurship

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.

Smallsat bus manufacturer NanoAvionics, took the first ever 4K resolution full satellite selfie in space with an immersive view of Earth with the help of an off-the-shelf consumer camera mounted on a selfie stick, the company said. A GoPro Hero 7 took 12-megapixel photos and 4K video clips of the MP42 microsatellite 550 km above the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef.

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.

Earth observation company ICEYE, announced the establishment of a new line of business focused on delivering fully operational satellite missions to customers looking to get their own orbital SAR capabilities. Governments and multinational corporations are able to purchase their own SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellites from the company.

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.

Airbus has been awarded a €160 million contract for ESA’s FORUM satellite to help improve the accuracy of climate forecasts by measuring the heat emitted from Earth into space, Airbus said. The Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring (FORUM) mission will comprise the first satellite to observe Earth in the far-infrared range.

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.

The developer, owner and operator of the Arnhem Space Centre (ASC), Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA), successfully completed Australia’s first commercial space launch on the Gove Peninsula in Australia’s Northern Territory, in cooperation with NASA, ELA reported. The BBIX rocket launch was NASA’s first launch from a fully commercial spaceport and the first of three rocket launches.

Launch vehicle company Isar Aerospace, has entered into a launch services agreement with space logistics company D-Orbit, to launch its ION Satellite Carrier to a Sun-synchronous orbit aboard Isar’s Spectrum rocket from Andøya, Isar said. Under the agreement, D-Orbit will become Isar’s primary customer from 2023.

Arianespace’s Ariane 5 launch vehicle has successfully placed two telecommunications satellites into geostationary orbit: MEASAT-3d for the Malaysian operator MEASAT, and GSAT-24 built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on behalf of NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), ArianeGroup said. The launch was the first mission of the year, and the 113th overall.