The launch industry is still recovering from a downturn that reduced the number of competitors in the market and forced the remaining players to restructure. These companies also have become more reliant on government spending. A recovery is being driven by the reduction of launch vehicle operators and an increase in launch opportunities, but an expected decline in satellite purchases and an increase in the number of launch vehicle operators could fuel greater competition.

Launch industry managers worldwide will go after government markets as the industry continues its recovery from a downturn that has brought a reduction in the number of competitors in the market and forced the remaining players to restructure. While the reduction of launch vehicle operators and an increase in launch opportunities is driving recovery for the survivors, an expected decline in satellite purchases and rise in the number of launch vehicle operators down the road could fuel greater competition in coming years.

Although space assets play a vital military role on the battlefield, militaries are being forced to balance increased demand for satellite capabilities with tightening budgets. The current drive of governments worldwide to rein in spending will have an effect on military satellite procurement during the next decade.

“It hasn't been splatted by the Internet” is how a friend once described an Ethiopian village she'd visited. Her short sentence reveals the nostalgia for a simpler life felt by many in the developed world who have never experienced it themselves, and a truth about the economic position of the so-called dark continent.

Controllers guiding NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) are planning their next trajectory-correction maneuver on March 26, after a major burn Jan. 11 sent the big rover and its Atlas V upper stage on their separate ways. A 3-hr. series of thruster pulses set up the rover for an Aug. 6 powered descent into Gale Crater, while the upper stage was left to proceed away from the planet. The Nov. 26 launch was deliberately targeted away from Mars to prevent the upper stage from plummeting into the Martian environment with Earthly contaminants.

A multibillion-dollar annual market for space tourism and launch services could emerge within the next five years, projects suborbital spaceflight hopeful XCOR Aerospace, which aims to begin flight tests of its first Lynx reusable launch vehicle by year-end.

Operational satellite networks that routinely monitor Earth's climate in the same way meteorological satellites watch the weather today will be extremely useful as the links between human activity and long-term environmental conditions become better understood, and perhaps more dangerous. It is an opportunity the aerospace industry cannot afford to pass up, given its unique ability to address climate-change issues.

Despite its programmatic progress and status as an acquisition reform program for the U.S. Air Force, GPS III—as with any other Pentagon project—is under the microscope and could be subject to funding cuts. The budget environment at the Pentagon gives new meaning to the term “capture team,” which is used to describe the group assigned by a company to win a program. Many contractors say they feel they are in a perpetual “capture team” mode, constantly fighting not only to win programs, but to keep them once they have won the contract.