On 21 October 2011, the first pair of Galileo navigation satellites was launched by a Russian-built Soyuz rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

ESA’s latest CubeSat mission is destined to never leave the ground. Instead it is doing its duty as an opened-out ‘FlatSat’ – with its interlinked subsystems spread out across a table at the Agency’s Data Systems and Microelectronics Laboratory at its ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands.   

NASA continues to stand behind Boeing as the company works to resolve a valve problem with its CST-100 Starliner that will push back operational missions of the commercial crew vehicle into 2023.

SpaceNews

The U.S. government does not technically consider space systems “critical infrastructure,” which is slowing down efforts to protect networks from cyber attacks, experts said.

SpaceNews

Timelapse video made during ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet’s second mission to the International Space Station, “Alpha”. The camera is setup to take pictures at intervals of two a second, and the pictures are then edited into this video that plays at 25 pictures a second. The video is around 12 times faster than real speed.

Thomas shared this video on social media with the caption:

“Soar over Earth for timelapse Tuesday: clouds, clouds, Baja California, and more clouds. There are often many clouds covering our planet!”

Over 200 experiments are planned during Thomas’ time in space, with 40 European ones

While the climate crisis is, unfortunately, a reality, it is all too easy to assume that every aspect of our changing world is a consequence of climate change. Assumptions play no role in key environmental assessments and mitigation strategies such as we will see in the upcoming UN climate change COP-26 conference – it’s the science and hard facts that are critical. New research published this week is a prime example of facts that matter. Using model projections combined with satellite data from ESA’s Climate Change Initiative, this latest research shows that the global rise in the temperature of

Senate appropriators want NASA to select a second company for its program to develop crewed lunar landers, but provided the agency with only a small increase in funding to support that.

SpaceNews

The classified Chinese satellite Shiyan-10 is now active, nearly three weeks after suffering an anomaly during launch that appeared to result in the loss of the spacecraft.