Terran Orbital has completed a subcontractor order to deliver 10 satellite buses to Lockheed Martin, the holder of a contract to provide spacecraft for the Tranche 0 Transport Layer. The Boca Raton, Florida-based aerospace firm supplied the buses over a six-week period. According to Marc Bell, Terran’s CEO and co-founder, his company will also design […]
The mission of NASA’s Mars lander InSight has come to an end. Mission controllers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory concluded that the spacecraft does not have energy left to continue operations after it did not respond to two communications attempts. The four-year Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport mission provided the space agency […]
NASA is seeking ideas for reboosting the Hubble Space Telescope‘s orbit. According to a request for information posted on SAM .gov, NASA is looking for technical information on how a company might raise the telescope’s orbit. It also wants to know the risks involved in the mission and the probability of success. The agency said […]
SpaceX has won a $94 million firm-fixed-price contract to conduct the launch of Sentinel-6B, a satellite intended to continue a long-running effort to collect global sea level data. Deployment is set to take place in November 2025 from aboard a Falcon 9 rocket planned to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base. Sentinel-6B is a […]
An omnibus spending bill will give NASA $25.38 billion for fiscal year 2023. The NASA funding is a 5 percent increase from fiscal 2022 but is around $62 million less than what a House bill offered and around $590 million less than what the agency requested. A report accompanying the bill stated that at least […]
The Space Operations Command has fully activated its Space Acquisition and Integration Office to improve the execution and management of services contracts and programs. SAIO, located at Peterson Space Force Base, started its initial operations in June 2021, supporting SpOC missions and helping two combatant commands and the U.S. Space Force’s Space Training and Readiness […]
Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisitions and integration, said transitioning to smaller satellites would enable the rapid replacement of military space assets in case they are destroyed by anti-satellite weapons. He recommended purchasing satellites at fixed prices instead of using cost-plus contracts. According to Calvelli, such contracts result in the […]
TransAstra has secured separate contracts from NASA and the Department of Defense to contribute to space debris removal and domain awareness efforts. NASA awarded the Los Angeles, California-based aerospace company a Small Business Innovation Research deal for the Mini Bee Capture Bag, an inflatable apparatus meant to enclose and retrieve a small spacecraft or object. […]
NASA has awarded Northrop Grumman a $31.2 million contract to support the James Webb Space Telescope‘s phase E operations and sustainment. Under the sole-source, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract, Northrop will provide products and services to be used in the monitoring and maintenance of JWST’s systems. The contractor will monitor the telescope’s bus, optics and telescope, and sun […]
Leaders from the U.S. Space Force, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit discussed technologies needed in the future to ensure U.S. space superiority during the recent Space Futures Workshop. Also present during the discussion were space industry representatives, who shared their concerns and visions for defending U.S. interests in the domain. […]
