Satellite News

“It’s amazing. There was some damage to the pad, but the bridge is fine and the light bulbs in the hangar are still on and working.” — Sea Launch spokeswoman Paula Korn about the explosion of a Zenit-3SL aboard the company’s launch platform

Com Dev International Ltd. plans a C$4-million (EUR2.6 million, US$3.4 million) expansion of its Cambridge, Ontario/Canada plant that will expand its size by 22 percent.

Radyne Corporation announced that its Xicom Technology subsidiary received orders totalling US$4.0 million for power amplifiers for a follow on procurement for the Ground Multi-Band Terminal (GMT) and World-Wide Satellite Systems (WWSS) programmes.

Alliant Techsystems reported financial results for the second quarter of the company’s fiscal year 2007.

Since early 2005, SEISOP (Space Environment Information System for Operations), a space-weather monitoring and forecasting tool under development at ESA’s Space Operations Centre, has been successfully providing near-real-time space weather reports for Integral, ESA’s gamma-ray space observatory. In 2007, SEISOP will enter operational development aimed at providing all ESA missions with the same vital space weather updates, the agency said.

Several Russian institutes plan to launch small experimental satellites, officials said at a conference devoted to space exploration at the Bauman state technical university in Moscow.

NASA officials approved critical elements of a moon impact mission scheduled to launch in October 2008. NASA’s unmanned Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will strike the moon near its south pole in January 2009 in order to search for water and other materials,

One of the telecommunications systems aboard the recently launched Japanese experimental satellite Kiku No. 8 (ETS VIII) so far couldn’t be activated.