Space Exploration

There are three types of commercial space ecosystems, the historic one, the self-created and the incidental.  The first one is exemplified by over 60 years of the United States space program, where government-funded missions gave life to private contractors that gained industrial expertise nowadays being used to supply end-to-end missions for public and private customers.

NASA announced two opportunities to partner with the agency and help companies finalise the development of their technologies that could potentially be used for space exploration. NASA’s ongoing program, Tipping Point, supports space technologies that can advance commercial space capabilities and benefit future agency missions.

During this week’s Space Café, SpaceWatch.Global Publisher Torsten Kriening spoke with Ran Livne, the Director-General of the Israel-based Ramon Foundation. In 2015, the organisation became the world’s first nonprofit to pilot and manage a human-crewed space mission.

European leaders confirmed their ambitious plans to work closely together to accelerate Europe as a world leader in space during the 2022 Space Summit held in Toulouse, ESA reported. ESA, the EU and their member States will join forces to utilise the potential of space and to tackle urgent societal, economic and security challenges.

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and the European Space Policy Institute, we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and briefs. This is ESPI Briefs No. 52: ‘European Space Summit 2022 – What is at stake? ’, originally published in August 2021.

Founder and CEO of Shift4, Jared Isaacman, announced the Polaris Program, a first-of-its-kind effort to rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities, while continuing to raise funds and awareness for important causes on Earth. The program consists of three manned spaceflight missions demonstrating new technologies, conducting research, and concluding with SpaceX’s first human Starship flight.

The first set of images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows that the spacecraft’s primary mirror is performing as expected as it initiated its seven-step alignment process of 18 individual mirror segments. The mirror segments need to work together as a single optical surface to produce high-precision images.

Israeli chickpea seeds will be sent to the ISS to carry out a series of experiments aimed at controlling growth of crops with the help of technology, Stanford University announced. The delivery is part of Northrop Grumman’s 17th commercial resupply services mission to the ISS.

The Indian government announced its plans for launching its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander mission in August the year onboard of GSLV Mk 3, India's heaviest operational rocket. The mission will be the country’s second attempt to land a spacecraft on the surface of Earth’s satellite.

NASA and SpaceX provided an update on the preparations of the Crew-4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) with NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Robert Hines, Jessica Watkins, and ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. Lindgren will serve as spacecraft commander, Hines will be the pilot, while Watkins and Cristoforetti are assigned as mission specialists.