Having previously eschewed using the Lunar Gateway space station as a half-way stop for its human carrying landing system, NASA has selected three teams to build human landers/ascent craft to land astronauts on the Moon as part of the Artemis programme. The target...
While it was the mortality of humans was exercising the minds of most on Earth, it became apparent that something was badly wrong with the 11-year-old Venesat-1 (Simon Bolivar) Venezuelan communications satellite. It was summarily moved to a graveyard orbit in...
At SATELLITE 2020 in Washington D.C., Northrop Grumman’s Joseph Anderson talked about the company’s planned second in-orbit servicing mission. This follows the recent successful docking of MEV-1 (Mission Extension Vehicle) and its target Intelsat 901 in...
The much proclaimed Monday keynote at SATELLITE 2020, featured SpaceX founder Elon Musk. He spoke about the future of his projects at SpaceX, namely the Starlink constellation, and the in-development Starship, super-heavy, manned, launch vehicle. When speaking about...
Having licked its wounds over past investment failures – the ending of the XS-1 reusable rocket programme after Boeing’s unilateral withdrawal being the most recent example – US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is determined to pick more proven...
The first-of-its-kind docking of a service spacecraft with its client spacecraft, in this case of MEV-1 with Intelsat 901, occurred at 0715 GMT on 25 February 2020. This was the first time that two commercial satellites had docked together in-orbit. It was also...
