Rocket Lab will design two Photon spacecraft for a NASA scientific mission to Mars, the company announced June 15.  The mission dubbed ESCAPADE — Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers — will study Mars' hybrid magnetosphere. It is led by a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. ESCAPADE is being developed under…

Momentus has made a concrete step forward with a after a turbulent few months dealing with U.S. national security concerns with the business. The in-space transportation company announced Wednesday that it has signed a National Security Agreement (NSA) with the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of the Treasury on behalf of the Committee on Foreign…

Viasat continues its opposition against SpaceX’s Starlink constellation on environmental grounds, and said in its latest filing to the FCC that if the commission does not stay its approval of SpaceX’s Starlink altitude change, Viasat intends to seek a stay from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.  The issue in…

Ball Aerospace and Microsoft have demonstrated satellite-to-cloud data processing in recent tests for the U.S. Department of Defense, that also involved Telesat’s Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites.  In the tests, announced by Ball Aerospace on Wednesday, simulated data from Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) was pushed to Microsoft's Azure cloud where it was processed using Ball-developed event-driven…