RUSSIA POSTPONES LAUNCH OF 3 COMMUNICATION SATELLITES TO 2020 - As per reports, in September an unnamed official had revealed that three Gonets-M satellites will be launched on the Rocket carrier rocket this November but now it has been postponed to 2020. Another three satellites were supposed to launch atop Soyuz 2.1b rocket later this year. In 2020, another launch of Soyuz 2.1b with three Gonet-M was scheduled and in 2021-22 6 satellites are scheduled to be launched into space by two Angara 1.2 rockets.    More
(Source: Republic World - Sep 30)

UNPILOTED JAPANESE CARGO SHIP DELIVERS FRESH BATTERIES AND MORE TO SPACE STATION - A robotic Japanese cargo ship successfully arrived at the International Space Station Saturday (Sept. 28) carrying more than 4 tons of supplies, including new batteries for the outpost's solar power grid. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) HTV-8 cargo ship pulled up to the space station at 7:12 a.m. EDT (1112 GMT), where it was captured by a robotic arm wielded by NASA astronaut Christina Koch inside the orbiting lab. The station and HTV-8, also known as Kounotori 8 (Kounotori means "white stork" in Japanese), were soaring 262 miles (422 kilometers) over Angola in southern Africa at the time.    More
(Source: Space.com - Sep 29)

RUSSIA QUIETLY BUILDING NETWORK OF SPY SATELLITES THAT CAN SPOT US MISSILES FROM SPACE - RUSSIA has launched another of its secretive spy satellites designed to silently track nukes fired from the US. Hurled into orbit from a launchpad in northeast Russia, the probe can detect long-range missiles the moment they launch and record their progress across the sky. It's the third such satellite to be deployed by Russia since 2015 as part of plans to build a network of warhead-tracking space tech.   More
(Source: The Sun - Sep 28)

SOYUZ 2-1B LAUNCHES LATEST TUNDRA SATELLITE - Russia’s Soyuz rocket has made its second launch in less than twenty-four hours, delivering a missile detection satellite to orbit Thursday in a military launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Soyuz lifted off at 10:46 Moscow Time (07:46 UTC), placing the Tundra satellite into its planned orbit with the aid of a Fregat upper stage.   More
(Source: NASASpaceFlight.com - Sep 27)

FIRST UAE ASTRONAUT LIFTS OFF WITH US AND RUSSIAN SPACE STATION CREW - The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has now become the 40th country in history to see one of its citizens fly into space with the launch of a crew bound for the International Space Station. Hazzaa AlMansoori, a spaceflight participant flying under a contract between Russia's space agency and the UAE's Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), lifted off with cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos and astronaut Jessica Meir of NASA on Wednesday (Sept. 25).    More
(Source: Space.com - Sep 25)

CHINA LAUNCHES ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING SATELLITE - China launched a Long March 2D rocket Wednesday carrying a Yunhai environmental monitoring satellite into an orbit some 470 miles (760 kilometers) above Earth. The Long March 2D booster took off from the Jiuquan launch base in the Inner Mongolia region of northwest China at 0054 GMT Wednesday (8:54 p.m. EDT Tuesday), according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. Liftoff of the two-stage, liquid-fueled Long March 2D rocket occurred at 8:54 a.m. Beijing time.   More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Sep 25)

DO SATELLITE MEGA-CONSTELLATIONS REALLY HAVE TO BE SO BIG? - “There are no rules in space,” Greg Wyler said at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last Thursday. His company, OneWeb, wants to launch 2,000 satellites into space—practically doubling the number of satellites currently orbiting Earth—in order to deliver internet connectivity to unconnected places. As long as he has permission to access the radio frequency spectrum he’s requested, there’s no one to really stop him. Nor is there anyone to stop SpaceX from launching a whopping 12,000 satellites over the next several years in order to operate its Starlink internet service.   More
(Source: MIT Technology Review - Sep 25)

FRESH BATTERIES, EXPERIMENTS ON THE WAY TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION - A Japanese H-2B rocket fired into orbit Tuesday from the Tanegashima Space Center with an automated cargo freighter loaded with more than 4.1 tons of batteries, experiments, spacewalk equipment, water and provisions for the International Space Station. The unpiloted cargo ship lifted off at 1605:05 GMT (12:05:05 p.m. EDT) Tuesday from Launch Pad No. 2 at Tanegashima, an oceanfront spaceport on an island in southern Japan.   More
(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Sep 25)

KEEPING SATELLITES FROM GOING BUMP IN THE NIGHT - On September 2, the European Space Agency’s operations account announced that ESA’s Aeolus spacecraft, an Earth science mission launched a year earlier, had performed a collision avoidance maneuver earlier that day to avoid a SpaceX Starlink satellite. This was, ESA said, the first such maneuver to avoid a “megaconstellation” satellite. The maneuver was a success—Aeolus raised its orbit slightly to avoid the Starlink satellite—but the discussion was only starting.   More
(Source: The Space Review - Sep 24)

Previous Next