Commercial Space

Startup Loft Orbital has doubled its order from Airbus OneWeb Satellites to 30 spacecraft, the company said April 6.

A Blue Origin New Shepard suborbital booster failed during an uncrewed Sept. 12 launch due to structural fatigue on the engine nozzle.

Russia plans to launch its first civil radar observation satellite–Kondor-FKA–on May 27.

Dawn Aerospace’s Mk-II Aurora spaceplane has received an aircraft certification from the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand.

Sierra Space is moving on to tests of its inflatable habitat technology with hard structures inside the pressure shell.

After a controlled burn lasting several minutes from its main propulsion system, ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 lunar lander entered the Moon’s orbit on March 21.

The U.S. Commerce Dept. has finished a pilot program to demonstrate the ability of the U.S. to track objects in GEO using commercial data and analytic services.

OneWeb intends to look beyond OneWeb Satellites, which it jointly owns with Airbus, for a manufacturing partner for its next-generation constellation.

The U.S. Space Force plans to set up an organized reserve of commercial space capabilities to augment military satellites when needed.

Impulse Space is moving into a larger 60,000 ft.2 facility in Redondo Beach, California.

Amazon on March 14 unveiled a trio of customer terminals to support the network’s global broadband communications.

The company also announced March 13 that it has an agreement with Rivada Space Networks.

Pale Blue of Tokyo says it successfully demonstrated its water vapor propulsion system in low Earth orbit aboard Sony’s EYE nanosatellite.

Ispace, which has a lander en route to the Moon, plans to list its shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market on April 12.

Lonestar Data Holdings, a startup developing a data center for Moon-based operations, has raised $5 million in a seed round.

Earth observation satellite builder Axelspace, in collaboration with Tokyo Institute of Technology, has designed a novel Ka-band radio for microsatellites.

The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract is part of the Foreign Commercial Imagery Program.

SpaceX fired up 32 of the 33 Raptor engines on its first Starship/Super Heavy booster for a static hot-fire on Feb. 9.

Small satellites dominated the space industry in terms of numbers, accounting for 95% of all spacecraft launched in 2022, according to a report by Bryce Tech.

Spacetug developer Exotrail of France has raised a $58 million Series B round.