THE PENTAGON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s fiscal 2013 funding request of $7.75 billion includes a major departure for the agency’s testing regime: shelving the massive Raytheon Sea-Based X-Band (SBX) radar. MDA has long used the radar, which is mounted on a large, floating platform, for providing targeting and discrimination data during flight tests in the Pacific region.

New programs to continue research into boost-glide hypersonic weapons for tactical and global precision strike are included in the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (Darpa) $2.82 billion budget request for fiscal 2013.

PARIS — Europe’s new Vega rocket lifted off like a streak from its launch pad at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou during a flawless Feb. 13 debut that carried nine satellites to orbit: the Lares laser relativity satellite, Italy’s Almasat-1 and seven cubesats developed by European universities.

THE PENTAGON — The U.S. Air Force’s $154.3 billion fiscal 2013 budget request — roughly $12 billion less than the service requested in 2012 — includes termination of two aircraft efforts aimed at building partnerships with allies, as well as a new missile outlined for use in stealthy aircraft.

The new NASA budget request pulls the plug on two long-planned joint missions to Mars with the European Space Agency, but agency managers say they are already in touch with their ESA counterparts about a smaller-scale Mars mission in the 2018 planetary launch window.

After two launch failures with Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Taurus XL solid-fuel rocket, NASA has decided to try to launch its replacement Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) on another vehicle. The agency and the company signed a bilateral contract modification Feb. 2 that will terminate Orbital’s task order to loft OCO-2 under its NASA Launch Services II (NLS-II) contract. An agency spokesman said the action does not end Orbital’s NLS-II contract, which provides NASA with different launch options under a “catalogue” approach.

NASA will take only an $89 million cut in its topline spending request for fiscal 2013 compared to this year’s operating plan, sources said Feb. 10, but the $17.711 billion NASA budget proposal due out Feb. 13 will axe the joint effort with Europe to return samples from Mars, to pay for development overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope.

PARIS — A joint European-Russian proposal that assumes no NASA participation in ExoMars has been submitted to the directors of the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos ahead of a Feb. 15 meeting of ESA leaders.