Accion Systems and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have reached a partnership to  research and develop electrospray technology. The goal is to create high-efficiency systems capable of delivering significant total impulse for future small satellites. The Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), announced Monday, was finalized in May 2020. This partnership will continue…

SpaceX has received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for suborbital flight tests of its Starship rocket prototype from the test site in Boca Chica, Texas.  The approval, issued and effective May 28, is good for two years. It comes with the requirement to identify and report any anomaly to the FAA occurring on…

In our recent column, we proposed a golden triangle of competitive differentiation in the satcom industry, comprising advantageous configurations of orbit, spectrum and payload to host a subset of 5G satcom services within a unified "network of networks." With the LeoSat and OneWeb bankruptcies and most recently Intelsat filing for Chapter 11 protection, it seems…

Throwing money at problems works in space, too! A paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that the space debris problem can be fixed once and for all, not by the engineers and scientists who consider space their domain, but with cold, hard cash: about $235,000 per satellite. Such a plan would create financial barriers…