Government

Australia announced the establishment of the Defence Space Command, a space defence agency to secure the country's place in the cosmos. The Space Command is designed to counter the US, Russia and China’s ability to destroy a satellite in space. The agency will also aim to increase the national understanding of space threats.

The critical mirror alignment steps of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are now complete and the team expects to meet or even exceed the optical performance science goals set for the space telescope, NASA said. Every optical parameter that has been checked and tested is performing at, or above, expectations, according to NASA.

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft atop has rolled out for the first time for a final uncrewed test before the Artemis 1 Moon mission. It took 10 hours and 28 minutes for SLS and Orion to reach the launch pad four miles away from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).

Russian cosmonauts Denis Matveyev, Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Korsakov, the first cosmonauts to arrive on the ISS since Russia invaded Ukraine, docked wearing bright yellow suits with blue trimmings. As the standard-issue Russian uniform is blue, speculations started as to why they chose the colours of the Ukrainian flag.

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and The Strategist, we have been granted permission to publish selected articles. This is “Australia needs to aim high with space strategic update” by Malcolm Davis, originally published on 11 March 2022. Last week at the 13th Australian Space Forum in Adelaide, the minister for science and technology, Melissa Price, 

Last weekend I received a link to the presentation that Steve Collar (CEO of SES) gave during GovSatCom22 in Luxemburg late last month. Steve is someone I genuinely respect, and we go back a long time. I fondly remember working with him on a DVB-RCS project back in 2003 that we thought was going to be critically important for the future of our industry,

ESA announced the suspension of the ExoMars programme in alignment with the sanctions imposed on Russia by its Member States. ESA’s ruling Council assessed the situation that the war in Ukraine caused with regards to ExoMars, and came to a unanimous decision. The Council came to the conclusion that it was impossible to keep cooperating with Roscosmos on the ExoMars rover mission.

NASA said it was ready to roll out the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket tomorrow for a fueling and countdown rehearsal. The SLS with Orion mounted on it will be transported from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center to Launch Complex 39B. It will take approximately 11 hours  for the spacecraft to reach the pad.

House and Senate appropriators published the omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2022, offering US $24 billion to NASA. The amount is US $760 million less than what the agency requested. The largest cut is in the space technology directorate, US $1.1 billion instead of the sought US $1.425 billion.

Bharti Enterprises, OneWeb’s largest shareholder said that bringing manufacturing into the UK would be problematic, despite the government’s ambitions to stimulate a domestic space industry. Sunil Bharti Mittal, chair of Bharti Enterprises, said that they would encourage the winner of the contract for OneWeb’s second-generation satellites to manufacture in the UK but there were no guarantees.