First suborbital test still on target for year-end

Atlas 5 has been a workhorse of U.S. military and civil payloads

It is a plausible approach on its face. The U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) is a detailed list of munitions no one wants to fall into the wrong hands. It includes deadly hardware up to and including nuclear weapons. In the late 1990s, it also came to include satellite components, regardless of their end use. But because the State Department export-licensing bureaucracy proved more difficult to manage than the Commerce Department counterpart, the U.S. satellite industry found itself hobbled at the very time it faced growing competition abroad.

As U.S. loosens satellite export rules, suppliers own up to violations

Satellite industry's export woes may not be solved by reforms

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in the defense sector has been at a standstill in 2013 in the over-$100 million category. There have been several noteworthy commercial acquisitions announced by companies with defense operations: Rockwell Collins said last month it is buying Arinc from Carlyle, and Alliant Techsystems is purchasing Caliber Co. from Norwest Equity Partners and Bushnell from MidOcean Partners. But heading into September, the number of defense deals with prices in excess of $100 million is easy to add up: zero.

A three-man U.S.-Russian crew is back on Earth after a successful 5.5-month expedition to the International Space Station. Weary but in good shape, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, Expedition 36 ISS commander Pavel Vinogradov and fellow cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin were assisted from their capsule by helicopter-borne Russian recovery teams within minutes of touching down under parachute at 10:58 p.m. EDT Sept. 10 (8:58 a.m. Sept. 11 local time).

Scientists will spend 100 days studying the Moon's tenuous atmosphere after this spectacular launch from Wallops Island, Va., on a solid-fuel Minotaur V rocket—photographed from the top of New York's Rockefeller Center, 200 mi. away. Built by NASA's Ames Research Center, the 884-lb. Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (Ladee) gave its handlers a few tense hours right after its Sept. 6 liftoff when fault-protection limits shut down its reaction wheels. Controllers disabled them to restart the wheels, and later fixed a star-tracker misalignment.