Satellite News

“SpaceX’s upgraded Falcon 9 booster powered up to full throttle in a brief ignition at the company’s Central Texas test site this week as engineers prepare for the rocket’s return to flight as soon as mid-November with a European communications satellite. The November launch from Cape Canaveral, which will haul up the SES 9 television broadcasting platform, will also be the debut mission for the latest version of the Falcon 9 rocket with higher throttle settings, condensed fuel and structural modifications.” (Spaceflight Now)

Rocket: Rokot/Briz-KM; Payload: three Rodnik satellites [Kosmos-2507, Kosmos-2508 and Kosmos-2509]; Date: 23 September 2015, 2200 UTC; Launch site: Plesetsk, Russia. “The light-class Rokot carrier rocket successfully put into orbit at the designated time three Russian Defence Ministry space vehicles,” according to a Russian Defence Ministry spokesperson.

On its ninth launch of 2015 from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, and the fifth Ariane 5 mission, Arianespace will launch Sky Muster for Australian operator nbn and ARSAT-2 for Argentine operator ARSAT.

SES Government Solutions (SES GS) said it will support the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) on the ground as well as in space.

DigitalGlobe, Inc. announced that the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has executed the next year of the Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery (Global EGD) programme under the NGA EnhancedView contract starting on 1 September 2015.

NASA and Orbital ATK are getting fired up for a second qualification ground test for the largest, most powerful boosters ever built for the agency’s new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS).

Azerbaijan’s second telecommunications satellite, Azerspace-2, will be built by SSL even though the contract was expected to go to Orbital ATK. The move was reportedly caused by the inability to secure financing through the U.S. Export-Import bank, whose authority has lapsed.

Broadcast connectivity supplier SIS LIVE has signed a distribution agreement with Eutelsat Broadband (Paris:ETL) to use and resell its NewsSpotter newsgathering service.