Lifting off from the ELA-1 launch pad, Kourou, French Guiana, an Italian-built, Arianespace marketed, Vega light-launcher carried two Israeli-built Earth observation (EO) spacecraft to a sun-synchronous orbit. The launch occurred at 0158 GMT, 2 August, and marked the...
Astrobotic Technology Inc, a new lunar logistics company, has contracted with launch provider United Launch Alliance (ULA), of the USA, for a secondary payload spot on an Atlas V launch in 2019. Astrobotic announced on 26 July that it would use the ride-share...
At 0636 GMT, on 14 July, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, hosted the launch of a Russian Soyuz 2-1A vehicle, carrying 73 payloads into low Earth orbit (LEO). The mission’s primary payload was the KANOPUS -V-IK 1, built for Roscosmos by JSC VNIIEM to provide...
XCOR Aerospace, the space tourism outfit that once vied with Virgin Galactic to be the first to carry tourists into suborbital space on regular flights of its Lynx space plane, is on the point of folding. Having already laid off of half of its 60 employees in 2016,...
A Falcon 9 rocket made a launch at 2338 GMT on 5 July from the SpaceX pad at the Kennedy Space Centre. On board was the INTELSAT 35e (Intelsat Epic 3) spacecraft which is designed to offer high throughput communications in North and South America and over the North...
The US Air Force has awarded the United Launch Alliance (ULA) the “STP 3” contract to launch the STPSat 6 spacecraft on an Atlas V 551 rocket. The contract worth US$191.1 million was awarded after a competitive tendering competition with SpaceX. The...
