Satellite Launch Business

Virgin Galactic, the private spaceflight company founded by Virgin Group chairman Sir Richard Branson achieved success on 13 December 2018 after its SpaceShipTwo Unity (VSS Unity) reached suborbital space for the first time over the Mojave Desert in California, United States. VSS Unity reached an altitude of 82.7 kilometres near …

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a Presidential decree on 12 December 2018 that formally establishes the Turkish Space Agency, along with its roles and missions. The decree ends a long road for the efforts in creating the agency with the process disrupted by the political instability resulting from the …

The Egyptian government has received a second extension from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to fill its orbital slot with a military communications satellite in an unprecedented and likely controversial decision by the international organisation, according to reporting in Space Intel Report. In 2016 the ITU granted its first extension …

Inmarsat has entered into an agreement with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) to be the first commercial customer to place an order for the new H3 launch vehicle. The maiden flight of H3 is scheduled for 2020 with Inmarsat planning to deploy the new launch vehicle after 2022. This is …

Japanese New Space Earth observation company Axelspace Corporation has completed a Series B funding round raising approximately 2.58B JPY (U.S.$22.8 million). The round sees the allocation of new shares to the lead investor 31VENTURES – Global Brain – Growth I Joint Venture (managed by Mitsui Fudosan Co. Ltd. and Global …

Chinese New Space Internet of Things (IoT) satellite communications company Commsat had seven small satellites launched as a rideshare on board a Long March-2D launch vehicle together with two Earth observation satellites for Saudi Arabia from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China on 7 December 2018. The seven …

Saudi Arabia’s Earth observation satellites, SaudiSat-5A and SaudiSat-5B, were successfully launched on board a Long March 2D launch vehicle on Friday, 7 December 2018, from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre (JSLC) in Northwest China at 04:12 UTC. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) developed and manufactured …

The Board of Directors of Russia’s Glavkosmos have elected on 6 December 2018 Dmitry Loskutov to be the company’s new Director General. Mr. Loskutov comes to Glavkosmos with a wealth of governmental and defence-diplomacy experience. Until 2004 he worked in the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, engaged in …

The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) awarded GeoNorth Information Systems (GNIS) a five-year, U.S.$15 million contract for persistent surveillance services of the Arctic region. Lockheed Martin will provide a scalable geospatial processing platform to enable the surveillance project. GNIS will leverage Lockheed Martin’s Rosetta technology, which includes a versatile and …

Arianespace has been chosen by the Slovenian Centre of Excellence for Space Sciences and Technologies (SPACE-SI) to launch the Next-Generation Earth Monitoring and Observation High-Definition (NEMO-HD) microsatellite on the Vega launch vehicle as part of the Small Spacecraft Mission Service (SSMS) Proof of Concept (POC) flight in 2019. NEMO-HD, the …