Satellite News

Aerospatiale, which built the Arabsat 2B satellite that recently had an outage, did not become part of EADS as erroneously stated — at least not completely. Aerospatiale’s satellite unit, unlike the rest of the company, was merged with Alcatel Espace and thus nowadays is part of Thales Alenia Space. Many thanks to everybody who wrote in to clarify this. The article in the archive has been updated accordingly.

Alliant Techsystems and United Space Alliance (USA) successfully conducted the first in a series of six main parachute drop tests in the development of the deceleration system for the first stage of NASA’s Ares I crew launch vehicle.

A meeting of European Union transport ministers in Luxembourg regarding funding of the troubled Galileo satellite navigation project has ended without any practical result.

U.S. scientists have warned that an instrument aboard the planned NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) weather satellite will be incapable of providing imagery for climate science applications.

SpaceDev has been awarded a contract from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Orbital Sciences Corporation has been selected by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to design, manufacture, integrate and test the Nuclear Spectroscopic Array (NuSTAR) scientific satellite.