Swiss Space Systems (S3), a new commercial space company based in Payerne, Switzerland, will use the planned Colorado spaceport near Denver as the North American base for its air-launched Soar suborbital spaceplane. Under a preliminary agreement announced Oct. 8, Spaceport Colorado will be the U.S. home to S3’s converted A300, which will conduct dorsal launches of the Soar to deliver small satellites to orbit.

Officials at NASA’s Ames Research Center triggered a scientists’ boycott of a conference on the search for exoplanets with an inaccurate characterization of federal law governing access by Chinese nationals to NASA facilities, according to the lawmaker who wrote the law.

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LOS ANGELES — Test pilots pushing Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (SS2) toward a planned suborbital space flight in the coming months report the vehicle is rugged and stable, without any of the potential transonic flutter issues that could have bedeviled the design.

LADEE ARRIVES: NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (Ladee) has reached lunar orbit, one month after lifting off from Wallops Island, Va., on a Minotaur V solid-fuel rocket. Operated by a skeleton crew at Ames Research Center during the federal government shutdown, the 884-lb. orbiter fired its main engine early October 6 to enter an elliptical orbit. The orbit’s apogee will be lowered with subsequent burns to move the spacecraft into its commissioning orbit at 124-186 mi., where it will spend 40 days.

NASA has exempted the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) mission preparations from the federal government shutdown, primarily because the orbiter will be needed as a communications relay for the two rovers operating on the planet’s surface. Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder said in a post on the mission website that the agency “has analyzed the Maven mission relative to the Anti-Deficiency Act and determined that it meets the requirements allowing an emergency exception.”

Golden Spike is looking to 2015 for U.S. prime contractor selections to develop hardware for a series of $1.5 billion, two-person commercial lunar expeditions marketed primarily to foreign powers, industry and possibly a few wealthy adventurers.

NAVAL RESEARCH: The non-profit Center for the Advancement of Science in Space has awarded the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) a $250,000 grant to use the International Space Station’s hyperspectral imager to study halmful algal bloom in coastal areas around the world. Also known as red tide, the algal bloom releases toxins that are harmful to humans and marine life.