Space

Ready to reach out: Europe’s robotic arm for the International Space Station (ISS) is ready for its flight and task, Airbus said. Airbus space engineers have installed the European Robotic Arm (ERA) onto the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) and it is now ready for its flight to the ISS

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and Orbital Gateway Consulting we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and texts. We are pleased to present “Dongfang Hour China Aerospace News Roundup 28 June – 4 July”. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup! A special shout-out to our friends

Another SpaceX rideshare passenger last week was Tiger-2, a commercial 5G Internet of Things (IoT) satellite built and owned by 5G OQ Technology, a startup based in Luxembourg. Tiger-2 was successfully launched – together with 87 other satellites – aboard the SpaceX Transporter-2 rideshare mission, OQ said.

Space Race number two, more for Hollywood: the Russian actress Yulia Peresild and the American Tom Cruise compete to be the first to shoot a movie in space. In that race, it seems that the Russian star is in the pole position. The 36-years old actress and her director are planning to take off from Baikonur to reach the ISS in October.

Space Race number one: The founder of Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, will be his own first passenger and fly into space aboard his Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo (VSS) this week, on 11 July. Branson thus seems to be ready to beat Jeff Bezos who announced that he would get on board his Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, together with his brother Mark, for a flight on 20 July.

During this week’s Space Café, SpaceWatch.Global publisher, Torsten Kriening spoke with a Member of the European Parliament and member of the German Alliance 90/The Greens party, Niklas Niennas, about Europe’s role and response to the space race 2.0.

The global synthetic aperture radar (SAR) market size was valued at USD 2.21 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7% from 2020 to 2027, according to Grand View Research. SAR is capable of high-resolution remote sensing, independent of flight altitude, and independent of the weather. SAR has day and night imaging capability.

The European Commission kick-started the €1.2 billion European Defence Fund and awarded €158 million to 26 projects and another €137 million to the Eurodrone and the ESSOR software project. The adoption of the first European Defence Fund (EDF) annual work programme paves the way to the immediate launch of 23 calls for proposals, the Commission said.

Update from the launch front: 29 out of the 88 satellites that SpaceX launched in its Transponder-2 mission were sharing the ride through Exolaunch, another 3 are from the European Space Agency (ESA), Exolaunch and ESA said, while OneWeb launched 36 more satellite for its internet constellation on a Soyuz rocket commercialized by Arianespace from Vostochny in Siberia.

NASA awarded fixed-price, milestone-based contracts of up to $45 million for commercial-led work on Moon landing services, the agency said. NASA is seeking to mature designs and conduct technology and engineering risk-reduction tasks for the human landing system (HLS), which will ferry Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back, the agency said.