Satellite News

Honeybee Robotics announced that it will be acquired by Blue Origin. With major operations in Longmont, Colorado and Altadena, California, Honeybee will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Origin, headquartered in Kent, Washington.

D-Orbit S.p.A., an Italy-based space logistics and transportation company, announced that it will become publicly listed through a business combination with Briz Holdings Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company [SPAC]. The transaction values the company at an enterprise value of approximately US$1.28 billion (€1.13 billion) post-money.

Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. and JAXA, as part of the agency’s Space Innovation through Partnership and Co-creation (J-SPARC) programme, have successfully conducted an experiment to transfer a complete data file in a simulated low-quality and error-prone communications environment.

Astroscale said it has decided not to go on with its ELSA-d debris removal mission for the time being after detecting “anomalous spacecraft conditions.”

Rogue Space Systems Corporation announced the signing of a Bilateral Letter of Intent with Orbit Fab, Inc.. Rogue will provide observation services using their Laura Orbital Robot (Orbot) spacecraft for a future Orbit Fab Demonstration Mission. Additionally, Rogue has agreed to outfit their Orbots with RAFTI fuelling ports to support future on-orbit refuelling from Orbit Fab.

Thales Alenia Space has chosen the Safran Aircraft Engines PPS5000 plasma thruster to power six satellites in the second-generation Galileo global navigation satellite system (GNSS).

NASA has selected 12 companies to provide launch services for the agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) missions, providing new opportunities for science and technology payloads.

In its third dedicated rideshare mission with SpaceX, Exolaunch successfully integrated and launched 29 small satellites from customers across the globe. The company’s rideshare clusters aboard the SpaceX Transporter-3 mission were an amalgamation of microsats, cubesats (up to 16U) and PocketQubes.