Satellite Launch Business

Prior to this year’s High Level Forum in Dubai, SpaceWatch Middle East spoke with Simonetta di Pippo, Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), about this year’s HLF forecast. We are heading towards the 2017 High Level Forum (HLF) in Dubai. Last year the Dubai Declaration …

The Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia and Virgin Group (Virgin), have signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a partnership under which PIF intends to invest approximately $1 billion into Virgin Galactic, The Spaceship Company and Virgin Orbit, with an option for $480 million of future additional …

During a press conference marking World Space Week, the head of the Iran Space Agency (ISA), Mohsen Bahrami, provided an update to the status of the five indigenously built satellites awaiting launch in Iran. The satellites (Doosti, Amir Kabir, Nahid 1, Zafar, and Pars 1) are all “on the agenda …

If you looked up in the evening sky on Monday 16 October 2017 at 7:33pm Dubai time you would have witnessed an 80-second fast moving celestial fire – then something special happened! SpaceWatch Middle East COO Torsten Kriening was an eyewitness to this phenomenon on Monday evening. It appeared to be multiple points of …

Angola’s first communications satellite, AngoSat-1, will be launched into geostationary orbit on December 7, 2017, according a spokesman for the Russia Space Corporation Energia (RKK Energiya). The launcher to be used will be a Zenit carrier rocket built in Ukraine, and the launch itself shall be from the Baikonur Cosmodrome …

According to Ahmet Arslan, the Turkish Minister for Transport, Maritime Affairs, and Communications, the eagerly anticipated Turkish space agency will be established this legislative year. Quoted in Turkish newspaper The Daily Sabah, Arslan justified the need for a Turkish space agency when he said, “As we have seen, the fact …

The Airbus-built pollution monitoring satellite Sentinel-5 Precursor has been successfully launched on a Rockot from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia at 09.27 GMT on Friday, October 13, 2017. Sentinel-5 Precursor is part of the Copernicus global monitoring programme, a joint European Commission–European Space Agency undertaking which aims to acquire continuous …

Pakistan’s national space agency, the Space and Upper Atmospheric Research Commission (SUPARCO), announced on October 4, 2017, that it expects the first Pakistani dual-use Earth observation satellite, Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite 1 (PRSS-1), and an experimental satellite, will be launched in March 2018. The launch of PRSS-1 has a potential …

Iran’s test launch of its Simorgh space launch vehicle (SLV) on July 27, 2017, caused significant yet unsurprising controversy throughout the international community. Two months later, with the dust literally settling, Natalie Fuchs – SpaceWatch Middle East’s contributing editor on all things Iranian space – argues that it is possible that the U.S., its …

As Earth’s orbits become more crowded due to more countries entering the space domain and the emergence of large commercial constellations, the challenge of sustaining space as an environment in which Earth can continue to derive all of the advantages of satellite increases. In a blog post originally authored for …