HOUSTON — NASA is looking into a possible cooling system leak after water seeped into the helmet of spacewalking European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano on July 16, prompting an early end to a two-man excursion that was to advance preparations for the arrival of Russia’s Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) later this year. Neither Parmitano nor lead U.S. spacewalker Chris Cassidy faced imminent danger, and all of the missed tasks can be rescheduled without urgency, according to NASA’s Mission Control.

GLASGOW, Scotland — The U.K. government will invest £60 million ($90 million) to advance cutting-edge propulsion technology in development at Reaction Engines Ltd (REL), a U.K.-based technology company that is building a radical new motor designed to power a reusable space vehicle. The new investment targets continued work on REL’s Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket (Sabre), which uses lightweight heat exchangers to chill the incoming airstream from more than 1,000C to minus 150C in less than 1/100th of a second.

ROCKET TEST: Engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center have tested a rocket engine injector made with additive manufacturing (AM), the 3D printing process that allows complex shapes to be crafted at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional machining. Aerojet Rocketdyne produced the injector assembly, which fired liquid oxygen and gaseous hydrogen in the test series, using high-energy lasers to melt metallic powder in a buildup process.

HOUSTON — Ad Astra Rocket Co., developer of the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (Vasimr), is moving forward with modifications to the company’s 200-kw. VX-200 ground test article intended to allow characterization of the engine’s thermal steady state.

NEW MOON: An astronomer using the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a tiny moon orbiting Neptune, bringing to 14 the number of known satellites orbiting the blue-green gas giant. Designated S/2004 N 1, the moon measures an estimated 12 mi. across and completes an orbit every 23 hr. at an altitude of about 65,400 mi. above the planet’s clouds. Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute found the new moon between the orbits of Larissa and Proteus while trying to track fast-moving ring segments around Neptune.

Lockheed Martin has completed and delivered seven antenna assemblies

NEW CREW: U.S., Japanese and Russian astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Kimiya Yui and Oleg Kononenko will launch to the International Space Station in June 2015, where they will join American commander Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, who are scheduled to be three months into the station’s first year-long stay. Lindgren, a former NASA flight surgeon, and Yui, a retired Japanese military officer, are rookies. Kononenko logged 393 days on two previous ISS missions. They’ll spend about six months in orbit, the ISS partnership announced July 10.

PARIS — Sweden launched an enormous, helium-filled balloon from its Esrange Space Center on July 12, carrying the PoGOLite (Polarised Gamma-ray Observer) telescope dangling beneath it.