NASA and the Canadian Space Agency have finalized an agreement for Canada’s participation in the development of a lunar-orbiting, human-tended Gateway.
Germany’s ambitions for a smallsat launch capability from the North Sea has prompted the formation of a consortium to develop a ship-launch capability.
The Amazon executive overseeing the Kuiper satellite constellation and connectivity service has said that the internet business behemoth will look to multiple rocket launch providers for access to space, even though launch provider Blue Origin is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The return capsule of China’s Chang’e 5 lunar mission landed early on Dec. 17, Chinese time, bringing back the first samples from the Moon in 44 years.
The Commercial Space Operations Center, now known as Comspoc, has formally split off as a standalone company from Analytical Graphics now that the latter has been acquired by Ansys.
President Trump issued his administration’s sixth Space Policy Directive on Dec. 16, promoting the development of space nuclear power and propulsion technologies to support a permanent human presence on the Moon by the end of the 2020s and the human exploration of Mars in the decade that follows.
With U.S. hypersonic weapon testing poised to ramp up, NASA has awarded Northrop Grumman Systems a $70 million contract to support the SkyRange program to field a long-range, flight-test data collection capability based on high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aircraft.
Ten years after the X-51 first flew under scramjet power, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory has completed ground tests of air-breathing hypersonic engines that could accelerate a vehicle 10 times the X-51’s size to speeds in excess of Mach 5.
The Kazakhstan Ministry of Emergency Relief on Dec. 12 received a new Mil Mi-8AMT heavy transport helicopter—the first airframe in the Mi-8/17 family assembled outside Russia.
Plans to move the U.S. Air Force’s UK RC-135 Rivet Joint operating location from RAF Mildenhall to RAF Fairford have been canceled after the U.S. Defense Department decided to keep RAF Mildenhall open.
Persistent lapses in NASA’s oversight of key Artemis elements continue to jeopardize upcoming test flight launch schedules and plans for hardware upgrades after the agency returns to the Moon’s surface with human explorers, a U.S. Government Accountability Office audit says.
The U.S. State Department has approved the Foreign Military Sale (FMS) to Italy of two special-mission versions of the Gulfstream G550 business jet configured for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).
Northrop Grumman helped lead a seed-round venture capital investment in Philadelphia-based Deepwave Digital, and the companies are looking to integrate Deepwave’s edge-compute, artificial intelligence (AI) technology into an “array” of sensor systems to improve capabilities and longevity.
