Virgin Orbit, a startup small-satellite launch company owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, will partner with Oita Prefecture, located on the island of Kyushu in Japan, to develop a horizontal launch site for its air-launched LauncherOne service.
Taiwanese space launch company Tispace has rescheduled its first flight to June in response to the COVID-19 crisis while continuing development work and preparing for production.
More than 12,000 well-educated aspirants representing every U.S. state and territory have applied for an uncertain and perhaps modest number of openings in NASA’s astronaut corps.
The global space economy showed strong momentum in 2019 but faces a significant challenge going forward due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Space Foundation cautions in the first quarterly installment of its annual economic assessment.
The Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center has awarded two contracts worth up to $500 million each to Raytheon and L3Harris Technologies to develop and produce new, secure modems.
Over the next three to six months, the Department of the Air Force is transferring 23 missions from the U.S. Air Force to the Space Force, expanding the nascent service’s responsibilities.
Veteran astronauts Shannon Walker of NASA and Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have been added to the crew of the first operational mission under SpaceX’s Commercial Crew flight services contract.
Virgin Orbit has developed a new, mass-producible bridge ventilator that is pending clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to fight the novel coronavirus.
NASA has selected the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, a multiple small satellite mission to study how the Sun generates giant solar particle storms while mapping the host star’s magnetic field lines as they extend outward into the Solar System.
Lockheed Martin says it is taking the final steps to ensure that the jam-resistant Military Code (M-Code) signal for GPS satellites is declared operational this year.
April will serve as a milestone month for the nascent U.S. Space Force. Not only will the new acquisition council meet for the first time, the service will also submit recommendations to the chief on unified missile warning architecture.
As Stratolaunch continues preparations to restart flight tests of its giant carrier aircraft next fall, the company has unveiled new details of the rocket-powered hypersonic vehicle fleet it plans to deploy for high-speed flight research and development.
The water that appears to have once flowed and pooled abundantly on Mars likely came from at least two sources during the Solar System’s early planet-forming epoch, a study says.
OneWeb Satellites said March 30 it is temporarily furloughing an undisclosed number of employees at its Titusville, Florida, manufacturing facility, citing slowing supply chains and travel disruptions due to the spread of COVID-19.
Among four astrophysics mission finalists recently selected for potential funding by NASA is the LargE Area burst Polarimeter, a low-cost proposal to observe Gamma Ray Bursts from a spot on the truss of the International Space Station.
The U.S. Space Force is assisting in the nation’s effort to combat the novel coronavirus by providing additional bandwidth to the USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) hospital ship that arrived in Los Angeles March 27.
The Coronavirus Relief Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) legislation includes $60 million for NASA to “prevent, prepare for and respond to coronavirus, domestically or internationally.”
The agency anticipates spending a total of $7 billion over 15 years—shared among multiple companies—to carry cargo to the Gateway as part of its Artemis lunar exploration program.
NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP) is soliciting proposals from U.S.-based companies and institutions for methods of dealing with mental health challenges that astronauts are likely to face during multiyear missions to Mars— strategies that could also address the psychosocial effects of pandemics like the current novel coronavirus.
