Space Exploration

Chinese officials have unveiled details of, and launch timeline for, its Tiangong space station now that the Long March 5B launch vehicle has been successfully launched and China’s crewed capsule has been tested.

While the planet has been on lockdown the last two months, a new space telescope called CHEOPS opened its eyes, took its first pictures of the heavens and is now open for business.

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos, has said that Russia is designing a new “orbital” station where crews will build deep space probes to explore the Solar System.

Russia and China are currently in talks to pool their resources for joint lunar operations, according to several Russian and international news media sources.

Last week, NASA released "The Artemis Accords: Principles for a Safe, Peaceful and Prosperous Future." The aim of the Artemis program, according to NASA, is to "[L]and the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, heralding in a new era for space exploration and utilization". I read the short, concise document that NASA  published with a great deal of interest, and a number of thoughts about international technology, economics, and politics came to mind.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is asking "What would you do with a large European lander on the Moon?"

As mentioned in Part One of this article, international space law is a modest, open regime, subject to expansion and clarification. At the international multilateral level, various UN treaties on space done after the Outer Space Treaty expand on various articles of that treaty.

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced on 26 May 2020 that it has signed a contract with Airbus for the construction of the third European Service Module (ESM) for Orion, the American crewed spacecraft. The contract is worth around €250 million.

On 15 May 2020, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine gave the first public presentation of the Artemis Accords, a NASA initiative to develop consistent and effective norms for the Artemis Program lunar missions to be conducted in partnership with space agencies around the world. 

NASA is naming its next-generation space telescope currently under development, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer, who paved the way for space telescopes focused on the broader universe.