Alphabet, parent company of Google, is shutting down Loon, its subsidiary dedicated to providing broadband from balloons in the stratosphere. Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth announced the news in a Medium blog post on Jan. 22.  “Loon has been chasing the hardest problem of all in connectivity — the last billion users: The communities in areas…

Two space scientists — Naia Butler-Craig and Hannah Kerner — have made Forbes 30 Under 30 2021 list for science. Butler-Craig is a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the High-Power Electric Propulsion Lab. Kerner is part of the NASA Harvest program and an assistant research professor at University of…

Intel detailed on Tuesday its contribution to PhiSat-1, a new tiny small satellite that was launched into sun-synchronous orbit on September 2. PhiSat-1 has a new kind of hyperspectral-thermal camera on board, and also includes a Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit. That VPU is found in a number of consumer devices on Earth, but…

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions has rolled out a new software platform, “OpenSpace,” composed of virtual products that enable satellite operators and Ground-as-a-Service (GSaaS) providers to design their own fully software-defined, dynamic ground systems, the company announced October 20. In order to include Software-Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities in its OpenSpace offering, Kratos said it virtualized…