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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
NASA to Provide Coverage as Dragon Departs...
NASA and its international partners are set to receive scientific research samples and hardware as a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft departs the International Space Station on Sunday, April 28 weather permitting. The agency will provide coverage of undocking and departure beginning at 12:45 p.m. EDT on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media. Dragon will undock from the station’s zenith port...

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Site-Wide Environmental Assessment for Marshall Space Flight...
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has prepared a Draft Environmental Assessment (EA) that analyzes the environmental impacts of implementing continuing and future mission support activities at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. The EA evaluated the potential environmental effects associated with air quality; climate change and greenhouse gases; land use; water resources; biological resources; geology and soils; noise; traffic and transportation; socioeconomics; children’s environmental health and safety; environmental justice and equity; hazardous materials and...

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Trajectory Reverse Engineering 
A strategy for transferring spacecraft trajectories between flight mechanics tools, called Trajectory Reverse Engineering (TRE), has been developed. This innovative technique has been designed to be generic, enabling its application between any pair of tools, and to be resilient to the differences found in the dynamical and numerical models unique to each tool. The TRE technique was developed as part of the NESC study, Flight Mechanics Analysis Tools Interoperability and Component Sharing, to develop interfaces to support interoperability between...

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Space weather requires our attention now more...
Today we are in the middle of Solar Cycle 25, which began in 2019 and will last approximately until 2030, going through cyclical highs and lows of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and solar storms that will peak this or next year — making this a crucial period of time to invest in solar weather monitoring capabilities.  Why it is important to study solar activity It is no exaggeration to say that solar flares and the geomagnetic storms they...

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NASA’s Hubble Pauses Science Due to Gyro...
2 min read NASA is working to resume science operations of the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope after it entered safe mode April 23 due to an ongoing gyroscope (gyro) issue. Hubble’s instruments are stable, and the telescope is in good health. The telescope automatically entered safe mode when one of its three gyroscopes gave faulty readings. The gyros measure the telescope’s turn rates and are part of the system that determines which direction the telescope is pointed. While in...

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NASA’s Commercial Partners Deliver Cargo, Crew for...
NASA partners with commercial companies to provide safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation of cargo and crew members to and from the International Space Station. A platform for long-duration research in microgravity, the station has operated continuously for more than 23 years, its crew members conducting a broad range of technology demonstrations and thousands of experiments in many scientific fields. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program provides systems capable of carrying astronauts to low Earth orbit and the space station through industry...

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Space Force opens bidding for classified communications...
Join our newsletter to get the latest military space news every Tuesday by veteran defense journalist Sandra Erwin. Processing… Success! You’re on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn’t process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again. WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force is kicking off a major procurement of next-generation communications satellites critical to the nation’s nuclear command, control and communications network. This estimated $8 billion procurement, known as Evolved Strategic Satcom (ESS),...

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