Armed with capital and an anchor customer for a trailblazing satellite life extension service, Orbital ATK has signed a contract to loft its first robotic servicing tug aboard a Russian Proton rocket in 2018 on a shared launch with a Eutelsat communications satellite. The Proton rocket and its Breeze M upper stage will send [...]
Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, launched a dramatic flight test over West Texas on Wednesday to verify the performance of an escape system on its reusable suborbital launcher designed to loft space tourists, researchers and commercial astronauts on short rides to the edge of space. The stubby, single-stage New Shepard [...]
SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk on Tuesday outlined an ambition to send humans to Mars with methane-fueled reusable spaceships and the largest rocket ever built, an effort he said will likely require government support and initially cost billions of dollars to develop and test. Musk’s rollout of his Mars colonization vision, a glitzy reveal years [...]
Virgin Galactic has now come one step closer to getting back into the space race after its new SpaceShipTwo craft, called VSS Unity, completed its first test flight yesterday. 'Today marks an exciting milestone in our shared quest to open space to change the world for good,' Virgin Galactic said. 'For the first time, a [...]
The U.S. Government has made a historic ruling to allow the first private enterprise, Moon Express, Inc. (MoonEx), permission to travel beyond Earth’s orbit and land on the Moon in 2017. This breakthrough U.S. policy decision provides authorization to Moon Express for a maiden flight of its robotic spacecraft onto the Moon’s surface, beginning a [...]
Planetary Resources, Inc., the asteroid mining company, announced today that it has secured US$21.1 million in Series A funding. The capital will be used to deploy and operate Ceres, an advanced Earth observation business that features the first commercial infrared and hyperspectral sensor platform to better understand and manage humanity’s natural resources. The funding was [...]
The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is beginning a two-year test campaign at the International Space Station to prove the innovative habitat’s technology is compatible with the stringent guidelines for human spaceflight. Packed into a depressurized configuration less than 8 feet (2.4 meters) in diameter and 5.7 feet (1.7 meters) long, BEAM will grow [...]
Deep Space Industries, the asteroid mining company, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Luxembourg Government to co-fund the development and launch of DSI’s first spacecraft. Known as Prospector-X, the small spacecraft will test key technologies in Low Earth Orbit that will be necessary for future asteroid prospecting.The agreement is a small, but important [...]
NovaWurks™ Inc., a provider of high technology space products and services, today announced it has signed a licensing agreement with Arkisys, a forward-thinking provider of large space platforms and innovative spacecraft solutions. The agreement serves to leverage NovaWurks’ Hyper-Integrated Satlet (HISat™) technology in applying Arkisys’ vision for the next wave of in situ assembled space [...]
