![]() Orbital ATK said the Cygnus spacecraft launching March 22 will be named the S.S. The next Cygnus cargo spacecraft to go to the ISS will be named after an astronaut who died in the Columbia accident. That landing, the fourth attempt by SpaceX to land the stage on a ship, was considered to have lows odds of success given the mission’s profile. Photos of the ship as it arrived at Port Canaveral, Florida, showed what appeared to be “charred debris” on its deck, presumably from the Falcon 9 that attempted to land there on the company’s latest launch. SpaceX’s “drone ship” returned to port Tuesday with what appeared to be debris from Friday’s attempted Falcon 9 first stage landing. The spacecraft is the sixth of seven planned satellites that will provide navigation services for India and the surrounding region. The launch of the IRNSS-1F satellite on a PSLV is scheduled for 5:30 a.m. ![]() The countdown for Thursday’s launch of an Indian navigation satellite is proceeding smoothly. While the spacecraft will be completed and ready for launch by August, its launch is not expected until 2017 or possibly even 2018 because of delays in the development of the next-generation ground system for the satellites. The satellite is the first of at least eight that Lockheed Martin is building for the Air Force. Lockheed Martin expects to complete the first GPS 3 satellite in August. Intelsat had previously worked on another satellite servicing concept with MDA, but cancelled that agreement in 2012. The agreement, which could be announced as soon as next month, will be the first contract for Orbital’s Mission Extension Vehicle, a spacecraft that would attach to a satellite to help extend that satellite’s life. Orbital ATK is nearing a satellite servicing deal with Intelsat. Bezos offered these details in the company’s first media tour of its Kent, Washington, headquarters. Bezos also said that the company plans another test flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle “soon,” without being more specific. Work on the BE-4 is on track, the company said, with full engine tests planned to start before the end of this year. Company founder Jeff Bezos said Tuesday that Blue Origin, which currently has about 600 employees, will grow to 1,000 or more in the next year. īlue Origin plans to hire several hundred employees this year to work on its BE-4 engine and orbital launch vehicle. Eutelsat, like Intelsat before it, was willing to pay a premium to accelerate the launch of its satellite. The launch was the second straight Ariane 5 mission that carried only one satellite, contrary to Arianespace’s usual approach of launching two satellites at a time. Eastern Wednesday and placed the Eutelsat 65 West A satellite into geostationary transfer orbit. The Ariane 5 lifted off from French Guiana at 12:20 a.m. ![]() Īn Ariane 5 successfully launched a Eutelsat communications satellite overnight. ![]() Nobody’s going to turn that into Terra Bull when things go wrong. Terra Bella still has plans to deploy more than a dozen imaging satellites over the next few years, but will move beyond providing just imagery to a variety of information products using that imagery and other data sources. The company, founded in 2009 to develop small, high-resolution imaging satellites, was acquired by Google in 2014 for $500 million. Skybox Imaging announced Tuesday it had changed its name to Terra Bella. A Google-owned satellite imaging company has a new name and business model.
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