Space

Luna-25, the first Russian lunar exploration mission in almost 50 years, is bound for the Moon.

German satellite launcher developer Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) has secured €30 million ($32.8 million) from global investment firm KKR.

Our roundup of the main aerospace and defense stories making the news this week.

Despite developing Parkinson’s disease, one of Virgin Galactic’s first customers boarded the company’s VSS Unity spaceship for a suborbital ride.

Using inputs from the fledging HAPS industry, Frontex believes HAPS would be useful for Earth observation.

Lunar Vertex (LVx) is a joint lander and rover payload combination that will land at Reiner Gamma on the lunar nearside.

Two Russian cosmonauts installed three orbital debris shields to the exterior of the International Space Station’s (ISS) Russian segment Rassvet.

SpaceX and NASA are meeting to discuss options for Artemis III’s return to the lunar surface.

The mission date is to be announced at a later date, and the name of the astronaut awaits approval by NASA and the other ISS partners.

NASA has awarded Advanced Space two new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 contracts.

Northrop bids dasvidaniya to rocket’s Russian engines.

The offerings are built around a new family of vehicles known as Elytra (a term for the wings of a firefly).

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and other key agency leaders are acknowledging challenges in meeting the December 2025 schedule for the Artemis III lunar landing.

The spacecraft originally were to fly on separate missions on startup ABL Space Systems’ RS1.

Benchmark Space Systems, a propulsion systems manufacturer, has raised a $33 million Series B round.

Russia has started to modernize its Glonass space-based navigation system with a new generation of satellites.

Space tourism company makes room for experiments and prototypes.

Lockheed Martin has opened a 20,000-ft.2 small satellite assembly facility at its Waterton campus in Littleton, Colorado.

Amazon plans to take advantage of an earlier opportunity to fly a pair of test satellites for its Kuiper broadband constellation.

Redesigning and testing part of the parachute system on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft will delay a long-awaited crew flight test (CFT) until March 2024 at the earliest.

Pale Blue has won a contract to provide its Resitojet water-vapor based propulsion system for a pair of 6U cubesats.

SpaceX has hot fired the engines of its next Super Heavy booster as it prepared for a second flight test of an integrated Starship-Super Heavy vehicle.

India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft reached lunar orbit on Aug. 5, setting the stage for a landing attempt on the Moon's south pole later this month.

The resumption of communications through NASA’s Deep Space Network follows a “shout” command transmitted to the probe by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA has reassigned astronaut Jeannette Epps, who has been awaiting a spaceflight since joining the astronaut corps in 2009, to the SpaceX Crew-8 mission.