Following Boeing Commercial Airplane’s recent decision to open engineering design centers away from its traditional Seattle base, parent company Boeing has announced plans to restructure its entire Research & Technology organization by establishing research centers in Alabama, California, Missouri, South Carolina and Washington.

Studies of “Super Earth” and slightly larger Neptune-class exoplanets using the Hubble Space Telescope are providing the first atmospheric characterizations of planet classes considered among the most common in the Milky Way as a whole. Those glimpses show evidence of clouds but little to describe their composition. Super Earths are characterized as having more mass than the Earth but less than Neptune.

SCIENCE PUSH: With a congressional budget framework in hand, considering passage last month of the so-called Ryan-Murray deal in Congress, advocates for federal spending on science endeavors are ramping up calls for lawmakers to follow through with greater appropriations for Earth and space science programs. “Federal science spending has plummeted by 16% over the last three years (fiscal 2010-13), the largest decrease in decades,” said Christine McEntee, CEO of the American Geophysical Union.

HOUSTON — The six-person International Space Station is headed toward a resumption of normal operations following a pair of unscheduled late-December spacewalks by NASA astronauts to replace a degraded external thermal control system (TCS) pump module. The astronauts followed the excursions with other measures to restore cooling to all U.S. segment electrical systems deactivated in response to a Dec. 11 flow control valve failure.

Cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy spent a frustrating eight hours outside the International Space Station during a record-setting Russian spacewalk on Friday, installing then retrieving a pair of commercial Earth observing cameras that failed to provide satisfactory telemetry.The cameras, delivered aboard the Progress 53 resupply craft on Nov. 29, were developed for UrtheCast, of Vancouver, Canada which plans to offer near real time Earth views to subscribers through the Internet in partnership with Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency.

NASA's Mission Control has re-integrated a series of crucial internal heat exchangers with the external thermal control system of the six person International Space Station, following a pair of recent U.S. spacewalks to deal with the Dec. 11 failure of a flow control valve in one of two external ammonia cooling loops.

BRAZILIAN SPACE: Brazil’s Visiona Tecnologia Espacial S.A. has signed contracts with Thales Alenia Space and Arianespace to build and launch a civil/military broadband communications satellite for the Brazilian government’s Geostationary Satellite Defense and Strategic Communications (SGDC) system. Visiona, a joint venture of Embraer and Brazil’s state-owned telecommunications company Telebras, is to become a satellite integrator for Brazilian space agency AEB. Near-term, the company has been tasked with integrating SGDC under Brazil’s national broadband initiative.

PARIS — The European Space Agency (ESA) launched its €940 million ($1.3 billion) Gaia star-mapping spacecraft Dec. 19 after postponing the mission one month due to technical issues involving a component flying on another satellite already in orbit. Equipped with twin silicon-carbide telescopes built around a single, 1-billion-pixel focal array, Gaia is designed to survey a billion stars in the Milky Way, providing a precise 3-D map to better understand the galaxy’s composition, formation and evolution.