After a successful first flight of the Ingenuity on Mars, Ellen Stofan, under secretary for science and research at the Smithsonian Institution, talks with Aviation Week editors about the historic nature of the mission, coming 117 years after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
The 4-lb. Ingenuity rotorcraft, designed and built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, was airborne in the thin atmosphere of Mars for several seconds, flight test data relayed to ground controllers showed.
Russia’s Soyuz MS-17 descended under parachute onto the steppes of Kazakhstan early April 17, ending a 185-day mission to the International Space Station for NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.
NASA’s sample return missions to the Moon, Comet Wild 2 and the Sun have proven scientifically game-changing, and agency planners behind the Mars Sample Return believe it will prove of equal value.
The owners of aerospace and defense group Sierra Nevada are creating an independent company to take over the former’s space business, to be called Sierra Space, which will sell to the burgeoning low-Earth-orbit and Moon commercial space markets.
Private space sector jobs reached a nine-year high in 2020, according to new Space Foundation analysis of U.S. government data, with the industry employing 148,000 people, while space-related mergers, buyouts and equity financings totaled $18.2 billion.
Lockheed Martin is offering a new line of its LM 400 satellites in response to military plans to develop constellations that have a variety of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), and target-acquisition capabilities.
Orbital Sidekick, a San Francisco-based startup aiming to offer satellite-based hyperspectral imaging and data analytics for the energy sector and others, has wrapped up a $16 million series A investment round, as expected.
The second Mission Extension Vehicle, MEV-2, autonomously docked with the Intelsat 10-02 satellite on April 12 in its operational GEO location at 1 deg. West longitude.
The announcement confirmed the spacecraft designers in Track B of Phase 1 of DARPA’s Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (Draco) program.
Gen. Thomas Moorman pressed a decades-long campaign through a minefield of bureaucratic and geopolitical obstacles to elevate a fractured and often dysfunctional space enterprise to a status equivalent to the naval, land and air domains.
