Astrium will study ways to use the technology it helped develop for Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle Columbus laboratory module.

HOUSTON — U.S. and Canadian Space Agency ground-control teams successfully advanced techniques outside the International Space Station (ISS) this week for extending the lives of aging satellites by refueling them, repairing damage or moving inactive spacecraft to prevent them from becoming collision hazards.

TECH TRANSFER: NASA has launched a new “technology transfer portal” where entrepreneurs, managers and others can look for new, publicly funded technology to commercialize. The site, at http://technology.nasa.gov, includes a searchable database of NASA patents available for transfer to the private domain, and links to agency specialists trained to help make the shift. “A priority of NASA is to get federally funded new technologies into the commercial marketplace,” said Mason Peck, the agency’s chief technologist.

Elaborate dress rehearsals that unite astronauts, scientists and engineers on the ocean floor to test hardware and mission operations strategies.

XCOR Aerospace will use its planned two-seat suborbital Lynx spaceplane to train crewmembers for missions that the Excalibur Almaz startup hopes to fly to low Earth orbit and beyond with surplus Russian hardware. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding during the third Royal Aeronautical Society European Space Tourism Conference in London June 20.

NASA and Canadian ground control teams began the second phase of a satellite refueling demonstration

NRO LAUNCH: United Launch Alliance and the U.S. Air Force launched the National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO) classified NROL-38 satellite from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral at 8:28 a.m. EDT June 20 aboard an Atlas V rocket. The mission marks the second of four NRO launches scheduled to take place over a space of five months this year. The next is slated for June 28. Launch had been delayed from an earlier target of June 18 to allow for a valve replacement that required the rocket to be rolled back from the pad.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Boeing is considering additional layoffs this year in anticipation of a broad decrease in U.S. defense spending should legislators fail to agree to $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction and trigger an automatic budget cut known as sequestration.