Space Missions

Industry veteran Bob Gough has joined the team at Goonhilly Earth Station as the company bids to expand its operations and develop new business opportunities across Australia and the Asia-Pacific. Gough will oversee commercial expansion across the region and will grow Goonhilly’s customer base in this new market, one that is experiencing rapid growth and that has just seen the establishment of the Australian Space Agency.

Israel’s SpaceIL has announced that it will launch its Moon probe on a SpaceX launch vehicle, to land in February 2019. If successful, the SpaceIL lunar mission will make Israel the fourth-ever country to land on the Moon, after the Soviet Union, U.S., and China.

Astroscale has reached a key milestone in its quest to develop space debris removal services in order to secure long-term spaceflight and sustainability.

The United Arab Emirates has progressed to the last 39 Emirati men and women who are in line to be selected as the nation’s first astronauts, one of whom will be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) from Russia next year.

Federal State Unitary Enterprise Experimental Design Bureau FAKEL (hereafter referred to as EDB Fakel) is one of the leading companies in Russia and in the world, having a 55-year experience in development of Electric Propulsion Systems (EPS), and more than a 40-year flight experience in Electric Propulsion Subsystems based on Stationary Plasma Thrusters (SPT), which were successfully used for station-keeping purposes aboard such spacecraft as Meteor and Meteor-Priroda in the 70s, and which have been used aboard spacecraft (S/C) of the Kosmos and Luch family since 1982, as well as aboard Gals and Express since 1994.

The UAE has announced that its first astronaut will be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019 with the assistance of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. This confirms rumours circulating last month about the possibility of the UAE's first astronaut being sent into orbit in 2019, despite the fact that the selection for the UAE's four-person astronaut corps has yet to be completed.

Last month ex-deputy prime minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin was appointed Director General the Roscosmos Corporation by Vladimir Putin, replacing Igor Komarov, who had headed the agency since 2015. Mr. Rogozin has overseen Russia’s space industry since 2011. He was placed under US sanctions over the Ukrainian crisis some years ago.

The Yuzhnoye Design Office continues its collaboration with Orbital ATK on the production and launch of the Antares launch vehicle. The area of responsibility of the Ukrainian enterprise is the hardware for the rocket’s first stage.

Russia has invited Turkey to send a Turkish national for Cosmonaut training, indicating that the relationship between these countries may now bear the substantial weight of ongoing human spaceflight cooperation obligations, despite difficulties on a number of issues, including Syria and the Armenia-Azerbaijani dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Diplomatic efforts are gathering in the Middle East and North Africa toward the development of a regional mechanism for space cooperation and development among Arab countries. At the recent Global Aerospace Summit in Abu Dhabi, the region made progress toward establishing an Arab space organisation.