Space Missions

NASA awarded fixed-price, milestone-based contracts of up to $45 million for commercial-led work on Moon landing services, the agency said. NASA is seeking to mature designs and conduct technology and engineering risk-reduction tasks for the human landing system (HLS), which will ferry Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back, the agency said.

The European Commission has selected ArianeGroup to participate in three space surveillance and early warning projects under the European Defense Industrial Development Programme (EDIDP), ArianeGroup announced. The projects are part of the “Space Situational Awareness and Early Warning” category of the defense program.

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and Joint Air Power Competence Centre, we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and texts. We are pleased to present “Outer Space, a Challenging Domain for Ambitious Defence Strategy” by Dr Anne-Sophie Martin, originally published on the Joint Air Power Competence Centre website.

The Goonhilly Earth Station in the UK will support the Moon missions of Intuitive Machines (IM), the station and the U.S. startup announced. IM has entered a long-term agreement with Goonhilly to support every stage of IM’s missions to the Moon, Goonhilly and IM said.

On the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts have increasingly relied on the support of CIMON, the astronaut robotic assistant, which was developed and built by Airbus for the German Aerospace Center Space Administration (DLR). The system, which has recently been updated with CIMON-2,

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and Orbital Gateway Consulting we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and texts. We are pleased to present “Dongfang Hour China Aerospace News Roundup 21 June – 27 June”. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup! A special shout-out to our friends at SpaceWatch.Global

Earlier this week, we saw a couple of significant space industry-related events in Hong Kong, namely talks by a variety of leaders from CASC, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and others. The events took place at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and covered topics as diverse as the Tianwen-1 Mars mission, the BeiDou satellite navigation,...

Paris, 28 June 2021. – Virgin Galactic obtained a license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to allow it to fly customers to space, the company said. The FAA expanded Virgin Galactic’s license as a commercial space transportation operator to allow it to carry people – or ”space flight participants”, as it said. 

by Molly Silk,  PhD Candidate, Chinese Space Policy, University of Manchester SpaceWatch.Global has been granted permission to publish selected articles and texts. This is “China is using mythology and sci-fi to sell its space programme to the world”, originally published 25 June 2021 at The Conversation by Molly Silk.

The team from Down Under won silver and bronze at Spaceport America Cup. The University of Sydney Rocketry Team brought home silver and bronze this week after competing virtually in Spaceport America Cup, an annual international student rocketry competition that tests the very best of budding rocket scientists.  The Aussie team’s good news comes at a troubling time for the harbour city