The U.S. Space Force is developing a strategy to strengthen its partnership with commercial space industry players, with plans to release it in the coming weeks. At the Global Aerospace Summit, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, a 2023 Wash100 awardee, explained that the strategy will provide guidance to effectively integrate commercial space services […]
NASA has named Mark McInerney as its director of unidentified anomalous phenomena research. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson explained that McInerney will lead the execution of the agency’s vision for UAP research, including collaborating on analysis activities with other agencies and using artificial intelligence to scan for such phenomena. Nelson emphasized that the work will be […]
Ball Aerospace and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have assembled the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope‘s camera system, which will serve as the observatory’s primary instrument. The Wide Field Instrument will work to capture images with a field of view that is at least 100 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope, providing astronomers with […]
Ball Aerospace has secured a potential 15-year, $486.9 million NASA contract to develop the sounder instruments for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Extended Observations program. The GeoXO Sounder is a hyperspectral infrared instrument that will provide real-time information about the atmosphere over the western hemisphere. The sounder will be used to improve weather […]
Northrop Grumman has awarded LightRidge Solutions company Geost a contract to supply eight optical sensor payloads for the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer satellites. Under the contract, Geost will deliver Starlite payloads, a smaller and more affordable version of the company’s sensors for large geostationary satellites. Starlite will be designed with the capability […]
Iridium Communications has secured an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract from the Defense Information Systems Agency to provide its Iridium Certus satellite communication services to the U.S. Space Force. Iridium’s deliverables under the contract include weather-resilient global broadband and mid-band mobile voice and data services and terminals. The IDIQ contract, which features a five-year base with one five-year […]
A RAND Corp. report found that the U.S. Space Force needs to overhaul the way it buys commercial satellite communications services. According to RAND, existing methods for procuring commercial SATCOM services prevent the government from maximizing commercial innovations. Specifically, the Space Force uses separate contracts with individual providers to procure capabilities, an arrangement RAND said […]
The Government Accountability Office says that NASA does not plan to measure production costs on the Space Launch System, the Artemis program’s launch vehicle. In a report to congressional appropriators published Sept. 7, GAO explained that the agency’s lack of production cost transparency hinders efforts to assess SLS’ affordability. So far, NASA has spent $11.8 […]
The National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. Space Force’s NROL-107 mission, also called SilentBarker, achieved geostationary Earth orbit Sunday for surveillance of U.S. adversaries in space. The mission was launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. According to NRO Director Chris Scolese, SilentBarker will […]
Ball Aerospace has tested the Weather System Follow-on – Microwave satellite, designed to enhance the Department of Defense’s space-based environmental monitoring capabilities. As prime contractor for the WSF-M project, Ball designed, built and integrated the spacecraft bus, ground data processing software and the Microwave Imager instrument that will collect environmental data at multiple frequencies. The […]
