Space

German space startup Polaris Spaceplanes has performed the first flight of its spaceplane demonstrator built under a contract from the German defense ministry.

Five days into the Artemis I flight test, the Lockheed Martin-built Orion spacecraft soared past the Moon, successfully conducting a 2-min. 30-sec. firing of its shuttle-era maneuvering engine on Nov. 21 to set up a slingshot maneuver into deeper space.

SpaceX has delayed by a day the planned launch from the Kennedy Space Center of the company’s 26th NASA-contracted resupply mission to the International Space Station, to address a small leak in a thermal control system.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has contracted with Lockheed Martin Space to construct a digital twin of the Earth’s weather.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) ministerial council plans to hear an ambitious €18.7 billion ($19.5 billion) proposal by a determined director general at its meeting Nov. 22-23.

Japan has outlined its planned contributions to NASA’s Gateway lunar-orbiting station.

NASA’s first SLS rocket had a long, adventurous life as ground-test hardware.

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

Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin carried out the first of three planned spacewalks Nov. 17 to continue upgrades to the International Space Station’s Russian Nauka multipurpose laboratory module,.

Gravitics has raised $20 million in a seed round to build large space station modules.

The Space Launch System (SLS) met all performance expectations during its debut flight, which sent an uncrewed Orion capsule on its way to a distant lunar orbit.

The new 16U satellite bus is tailored for Earth observation and space domain awareness missions.

Russia plans to more than double its government-owned constellation of Earth-observation satellites in 2023-25.

SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System is to support the second and first NASA Artemis-era missions to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon under a $1.15 billion contract modification.

The approvals help pave the way for the first planned orbital launch from the UK mainland for Virgin Orbit’s “Start Me Up” mission using its air-launched LauncherOne space vehicle that will be carried by its modified Boeing 747.

The most powerful rocket NASA has ever built lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 16, ending years of delays in the debut of the Artemis Moon program.

NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio resumed the agency’s efforts to upgrade the International Space Station’s solar power-generation system, with a 7-hr. spacewalk.

NASA managers clear the Artemis I launch team at the Kennedy Space Center to begin fueling the Space Launch System rocket for a long-delayed debut flight to put an uncrewed Orion spacecraft into a distant lunar orbit.

AST SpaceMobile has deployed what it says is the “largest-ever” commercial communications array in low-Earth orbit.

The two-hour launch window on Nov. 16 closes at 3:04 a.m. The mission marks the first flight of the SLS, which has been in development for more than a decade.

SpaceX’s 26th NASA-contracted resupply mission to the International Space Station has been readied to deliver assorted science and technology payloads focused on human deep-space exploration challenges.

There was approximately 2 hr. 7 min. between launch of the Tianzhou-5 cargo spacecraft and it docking with the Tiangong space station.

NASA managers have cleared the Kennedy Space Center launch team to start the two-day countdown for launch, but two technical issues that surfaced during post-hurricane inspections and tests still need to be resolved.

The U.S. Space Force landed the Boeing-built X-37B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Nov. 12, completing a 908-day mission that set a new record for endurance.

CAPE CANAVERAL—Post-hurricane inspections and analysis of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule, which rode out a Category 1 storm at the launchpad, show no impediments toward picking up the two-day countdown for launch as planned on Nov. 14, NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free said on Nov. 11.