Space

Italy’s largest private satellite manufacturer, SITAEL, is set to open its Australian headquarters on 1 July 2018 outside of Adelaide, South Australia, further cementing SA’s position as Australia’s premier New Space hub.

NewSpace company, Satellite Vu, has scooped first prize in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Ocean x Space competition.

International shipping exhibition, Posidonia, provided the perfect backdrop for the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between global mobile satellite service provider, Inmarsat and the Hellenic Space Agency (HSA).

The Sultanate of Oman has announced that it intends to build two satellites and then have them launched by the end of 2019, according to the Omani minister of transport and communications, Dr. Ahmed bin Mohammed bin Salim al Futaisi.

Final testing for the Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) CubeSat-M1 is underway. This first-of-three cubesats has been developed as part of a AUS$10 million contract with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra Space Centre, which was signed in November.

Russia has invited Turkey to send a Turkish national for Cosmonaut training, indicating that the relationship between these countries may now bear the substantial weight of ongoing human spaceflight cooperation obligations, despite difficulties on a number of issues, including Syria and the Armenia-Azerbaijani dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.

On 30 March 2018, a meeting of the Ukrainian State Space Agency Collegium was held in the city of Dnipro. During the meeting, the results of the work of enterprises and institutions of the Ukrainian space industry for 2017 were summed up and priority directions of work for the forthcoming period were determined.

Diplomatic efforts are gathering in the Middle East and North Africa toward the development of a regional mechanism for space cooperation and development among Arab countries. At the recent Global Aerospace Summit in Abu Dhabi, the region made progress toward establishing an Arab space organisation.

A political competition to host the headquarters of the new Australian Space Agency has emerged between Australian states, a development that a prominent Australian space policy expert is counterproductive, even pointless, and misunderstands the role and scope of the agency that is due to start operations on 1 July 2018.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted U.S.-Singaporean New Space company Audacy a licence for the first commercial inter-satellite relay network, and the implications of this are transformational for space communications as LEO operators, for the first time, can be in constant contact with their satellites.