Whether you call it coronavirus or COVID-19 you cannot avoid this “Elephant in the Room”, which is affecting much of industry and commerce, the world’s health systems and even basic human relationships. And space has not been insulated from the virus. Despite a tardy...
It has been reported that customers on the Thaicom 5 communications satellite have been moved to other satellites following a telemetry issue that is preventing control of the spacecraft. The nearly 14-year-old spacecraft was coming to the end of its design...
Having been successfully launched by a Proton M/Breeze M rocket on 9 October – along with its MEV co-payload – the Eutelsat 5 West B suffered a fault during deployment to one of its solar arrays (the array is deployed but has a major problem). The fault, if not fixed,...
After the US$416 million loss of the Falcon Eye 1 in a Vega launch failure, it was reported that the Chinasat-18 (Zhongxing-18) satellite has suffered a similar demise – albeit after a successful launch by a Chinese Long March 3B/G2. The launch took place at...
There is a key moment in the movie Waterloo (1970) when Napoleon – played by the late Rod Steiger – realises that the battle is lost as the shout goes round that the Imperial “Old Guard” has broken. And there was a similar shock in space...
As the 50th celebration of the Apollo 11 astronaut moon landing gets underway, some less well-known aspects of the mission have been revealed. One was that during the late 1950s the UK briefly considered starting a project to mount its own Apollo-11-style human lunar...
