Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (SS2) suborbital reusable spaceplane went supersonic Monday morning during a 16-sec. flight test of its hybrid rocket motor. The short-duration flight over Mojave, Calif., with two test pilots from Scaled Composites at the controls, brings SS2 a major step closer to its first flight into space, and ultimately to flights with paying tourists and researchers in the pressurized cabin.

U.S. NAVY

A failure review oversight board (FROB) convened by Sea Launch and Energia Logistics Ltd. has accepted the findings and proposed fixes of contractors investigating the Jan. 31 failure of a Sea Launch Zenit 3-SL shortly after liftoff from the Sea Launch Odyssey floating launch pad. The failure cost Intelsat a new communications satellite — Intelsat 27, designed to operate in the C- and Ku-bands for customers in the Americas, the North Atlantic region and Europe — and a hosted communications payload that could have been sold to a government customer.

OBSERVING EARTH: The commercial sector is expected to make up a significant part of future demand for space-based imagery intelligence (Imint), according to Adam Keith, director of space and Earth observation (EO) at Euroconsult. Only 11 countries have developed EO defense capacity dedicated to supporting Imint; the number of unclassified defense and dual-use satellites launched by these 11 countries totaled 75 over the past decade.

BEIJING — China has begun building a high-definition Earth-observation system, with its first space launch of 2013. A Long March 2D rocket launched the Gaofen 1 satellite and three other, small spacecraft for foreign customers on April 26 from the Jiuquan launch center in northwestern China. Gaofen 1 is the first of five or six spacecraft that are planned to be launched for high-definition observation of the planet between now and 2016, say state media. “Gaofen” means “high definition.”

Cuts would include commercial resupply of the ISS, employee furlough

HOUSTON — The International Space Station crew began to unload cargo from the Russia’s unpiloted Progress 51 resupply capsule on April 26, within hours of an automated docking ultimately unimpeded by a navigation antenna that failed to deploy after liftoff. The freighter, filled with just over three tons of propellant, water, research gear, spare parts and other supplies, eased into the aft docking port of the Russian segment Zvezda service module at 8:25 a.m. EDT.

Policy shifting away from research and development