UK EXPLORES PRODUCING OWN SATELLITE SYSTEM AFTER EU’S GALILEO SNUB - Britain is exploring plans to launch a satellite navigation system as a rival to the EU’s €10bn Galileo project in an escalating row with Brussels over whether the UK can be trusted with Europe’s most sensitive security information after Brexit. Greg Clark, the UK business secretary, is also taking legal advice on whether Britain can reclaim the €1.4bn it has invested in Galileo since the project’s launch in 2003 after a recent Brussels decision to shut the UK out of secure parts of the project. More (Source: Financial Times - Apr 25)
CHINA BEGINS SELECTING NEW GROUP OF 18 ASTRONAUTS FOR SPACE STATION MISSIONS - China has launched a process to select 18 new astronauts for missions to the Chinese Space Station, including men and women from air force, science and engineering backgrounds. "The selection consists of three periods, and we will select not only males but also female candidates for the third batch of astronauts," Yang Liwei, deputy head of the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), said in Beijing on April 23. The selected candidates will be trained for missions to the Chinese Space Station (CSS), a project which brings new demands for spaceflight and expertise. More (Source: GBTIMES - Apr 24)
BOEING, LOCKHEED, ULA CORNER THE GOVERNMENT-FUNDED SPACE MARKET. SPACEX MOVING UP - Attracting new players to compete for national security and civil space contracts has been a longtime goal of the Congress, the Pentagon and NASA. But as the numbers show, only a handful of contractors command the bulk of federal dollars spent on space programs. The U.S. government invested $83 billion in space platforms and hypersonic technologies between fiscal years 2011 and 2017, according to Govini’s new report, Space Platforms & Hypersonic Technologies Taxonomy. Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance — a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing — and Boeing captured more than half of all contract obligations, Govini estimated. More (Source: SpaceNews - Apr 23)
LAB TESTS AND LIFE SCIENCE AS STATION ORBITS HIGHER TODAY - A docked Russian cargo craft automatically fired its engines this morning boosting the International Space Station’s altitude a little higher. During the rest of the day, the Expedition 55 crew supported life science and swapped out station hardware. Russia’s Progress 69 resupply ship docked to the Zvezda service module fired its thrusters boosting the station’s orbit today. The two-minute, six-second burn establishes the correct orbit when three crew members undock and land in June and a two-orbit rendezvous capability for the Progress 70P resupply craft when it launches in July. More (Source: NASA - Apr 21)
ARIANESPACE TO LAUNCH JAPANESE BROADCAST SATELLITE - Arianespace on April 19 announced an agreement with Japan’s Broadcasting Satellite System Corporation and satellite manufacturer Space Systems Loral to launch the BSAT-4b satellite on an Ariane 5 rocket in 2020. The agreement follows the launch of BSAT-4a on an Ariane 5 in September 2017. BSAT is building up its satellite infrastructure ahead of the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, which start in July 2020. Seeking to have BSAT-4b as an in-orbit backup ahead of the games, BSAT picked SSL to build the satellite last month. BSAT-4b will feature an identical co More (Source: SpaceNews - Apr 20)
PROTON-M LAUNCHES BLAGOVEST 12L SATELLITE FOR RUSSIAN AEROSPACE FORCES - The Russian military has expanded its fleet of communications satellites with the launch of the Blagovest 12L spacecraft on Wednesday, April 18. The military comsat lifted off atop a Proton-M launcher at 6:12 p.m. EDT (22:12 GMT) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Due to military nature of the mission, very little information has been given about the flight as well as pre-launch preparations. It is only known that the launch was initially targeted for December 25, 2017, but problems with one of the satellite’s components forced Russia to postpone the mission several times. More (Source: SpaceFlight Insider - Apr 19)
CHINA SATELLITE SJ-17, FRIENDLY WANDERER? - When China published its description of SJ-17, the folks at AGI who track satellites for a living raised their eyebrows. The Chinese said it was an experimental satellite. But “the way they phrased it piqued our interest,” says Bob Hall, standing a dozen feet from AGI’s infamous ice cream stand here. More (Source: Breaking Defense - Apr 19)
EARTHNOW PROMISES REAL-TIME VIEWS OF THE WHOLE PLANET FROM A NEW SATELLITE CONSTELLATION - A new space imaging startup called EarthNow aims to provide not just pictures of the planet on demand, but real-time video anywhere a client desires. Its ambition is matched only by its pedigree: Bill Gates, Intellectual Ventures, Airbus, SoftBank and OneWeb founder Greg Wyler are all backing the play. Its promise is a constellation of satellites that will provide video of anywhere on Earth with latency of about a second. You won’t have to wait for a satellite to come into range, or worry about leaving range; at least one will be able to view any area at any given time, so they can pass off the monitoring task to the next satellite over if necessary. More (Source: TechCrunch - Apr 19)
SPACEX LAUNCHES NASA PLANET-HUNTING SATELLITE - In a modest mission with the grandest of intentions, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a planet-hunting satellite for NASA Wednesday that will measure the light from millions of stars, on the lookout for indications of Earth-like, potentially habitable worlds scattered across the nearby Milky Way. Building on the legacy of NASA's trail-blazing Kepler mission, which showed that exoplanets are commonplace, the $337 million Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will study vastly more stars across 85 percent of the sky in a bid to pinpoint thousands of new planets with the emphasis on Earth-size or slightly larger. More (Source: CBS News - Apr 19)
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