Space

Skyrora, the Scottish New Space satellite launch company, has moved its corporate headquarters to Princes Street in the heart of Edinburgh, Scotland's capital city, under a five year lease.

Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) has released the first Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images taken from orbit by NovaSAR-1, a technology demonstration mission launched into a 580km sun-synchronous orbit on 16 September 2018.

MIURA-1, the suborbital rocket developed by PLD Space, will be launched from "El Arenosillo" Experimentation Center (CEDEA), of the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial (INTA), Spain's national space agency, during the third quarter of 2019. This technological demonstrator, whose development began in 2011, is designed to provide scientific and commercial access to space from Spain.

ISRO recently announced its plans to undertake a mission to Venus in the early 2020s and has also invited international proposals for scientific payloads.

Kleos Space S.A. reports the signing of a commercial agreement with UK headquartered Intelligence Management Support Services Ltd (IMSL) for them to purchase Kleos Scouting Mission Data as a Service and to integrate and sell the Kleos data with related analytics services to government and industry customers around the world.

Australia's leading rocket company, Gilmour Space Technologies, has signed a long-term collaboration and supply agreement with global launch industry supplier, RUAG Space.

On Wednesday, 21 November 2018, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall spoke at the opening of the first International VENµS End-Users Conference organized as part of the France-Israel Season 2018. On this occasion, in the presence of Avi Blasberger, Director General of the Israeli Space Agency (ISA), he underlined the innovative nature of CNES and ISA’s joint VENµS mission (Vegetation and Environment monitoring on a New Micro Satellite) and its contribution to the Space Climate Observatory (SCO), a CNES initiative supporting efforts to tackle climate change.

Satellite communications innovator and space gateway Goonhilly Earth Station has joined the consortium backing the SmartSat CRC (co-operative research centre), a proposed space research initiative which plans to drive the Australian space industry through satellite technologies and analytics.

China and Myanmar held their first science and technology cooperation meeting in Yangon, where they established a joint radar and satellite communications laboratory as part of the nascent China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, a part of the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

As an international relations scholar who studies space law and policy, I have come to realize what most people do not fully appreciate: Dealing with space debris is as much a national security issue as it is a technical one.