After a 25½ day journey to the Moon and back, NASA’s Artemis I mission Orion spacecraft successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, west of Baja California, at 1740 GMT on 11 December. In doing so, it tested out the guidance and thermal protection systems...
Having previously lost the original Human Landing System (HLS) contract to SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has announced a new “National Team” to build a second lunar lander. in the new “National Team” Boeing replaces Northrop Grumman....
Kuaizhou-11 (KZ-11) returned to flight at 01:15 GMT on 7 December 2022 from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. KZ11 successfully sent the traffic management satellite Xingyun Jiaotong VDES aka Jiaotong VDES to orbit. It carries AIS tracking and VDES data relay...
While the primary purpose of the SpaceX Starlink large low Earth orbit satellite constellation is a commercial communications service, as has been seen in Ukraine, it has a significant military application. And so SpaceX is now pivoting towards this as it hopes to...
On 4 December 2022 Shenzhou 14 with its three taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe, aboard, left the Chinese Space Station (CSS), undocking from the Tianhe core module’s nadir port of the at 0430 GMT. The taikonauts had been onboard...
Thales Alenia Space (TAS) announced, on 1 December, that it had received an order for a software-defined satellite from Eutelsat. The satellite, known as Flexsat, is being built with an eye to GEO-LEO connectivity ahead of the expected Eutelsat/OneWeb merger. It will...