#WASHINGTON — Blue Origin successfully launched its New Shepard suborbital vehicle Dec. 19 on its first mission since a mishap more than 15 months ago.

New #Shepard lifted off at 11:42 a.m. Eastern from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. The capsule landed under parachutes 10 minutes and 13 seconds later, after reaching a peak altitude of 107 kilometers, while the propulsion module landed vertically using its engine nearly three minutes earlier. #spacenews

#WASHINGTON — A new study released Dec. 18 sheds light on potential challenges in the Pentagon’s ambitious effort to deploy a network of space sensors for detecting and tracking hypersonic missiles.

Based on internal modeling and simulation efforts, the study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies identifies areas for improvement in the planned network and raises questions intended to inform the conversation on what it takes to defeat these highly maneuverable missile threats.

“There is no such thing as a perfect sensor architecture design,” said the report titled “Getting on Track: Space and Airborne Sensors for #Hypersonic #Missile Defense.”

#Hypersonic weapons fly at more than five times the speed of sound. Their speed and unpredictable flight paths make them difficult to detect and track.

#WASHINGTON — #Amazon is seeking to dismiss a shareholder lawsuit filed in August that alleged that the company’s board of directors acted in bad faith when it awarded Project Kuiper launch contracts to #Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance.

In a filing with Delaware’s Court of Chancery Dec. 11, Amazon said a suit filed in August by a Cleveland-based pension fund that is a company shareholder failed to provide the “extreme set of facts” required by law to show Amazon’s board improperly approved the launch contracts while overlooking #SpaceX.

The lawsuit claimed that the board performed little diligence on the proposed contracts to launch the 3,236-satellite constellation with the Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur rockets. The combined contracts were, it stated, the second largest capital expenditure in Amazon’s history at the time, trailing only its $13.7 billion acquisition of grocer Whole Foods.

#SANFRANCISCO – The first #NASA #satellite to measure air pollution hourly shows so much promise that space agency officials are already thinking about ways to extend its life.

“We want #TEMPO to last for 10 years, if possible,” Barry Lefer, #NASA tropospheric composition program manager, said Dec. 12 at the American #Geophysical Union annual meeting here. “So, we are going to baby it.”

TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, was sent aloft in April as a hosted payload on Intelsat 40e, a geostationary communications satellite. The instrument, built by Ball #Aerospace to measure atmospheric pollution from Canada’s oil sands to the Yucatán Peninsula and from the Atlantic #Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, made its first North American scans in early August.

#TAMPA, Fla. — International regulators are set to allow technical studies for changing #satellite transmission power limits on the condition that there would not be any regulatory action resulting from them until at least 2031.

The compromise follows weeks of talks about reviewing Equivalent Power Flux Density (EPFD) limits, a divisive issue in the space industry affecting how powerful non-geostationary (NGSO) satellite signals should be to avoid disrupting geostationary spacecraft.

NGSO newcomers including #SpaceX and Amazon argue that EPFD rules are outdated after being created more than a decade ago, constraining their constellation plans more than necessary to protect satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO).

#ORLANDO, Floride — Quasar #Satellite Technologies — une startup qui suit les signaux radiofréquences émis par les #satellites et analyse les conversations radio pour en tirer des informations — vise le marché américain de la défense et du renseignement. Phil Ridley, fondateur et PDG, a déclaré que la société avait développé une antenne réseau numérique portable capable de surveiller les transmissions #RF de dizaines de satellites à la fois. La technologie, actuellement utilisée par l’armée et les agences de renseignement australiennes, est proposée au gouvernement américain, a déclaré Ridley dans une interview lors de la conférence #Spacepower de la Space Force Association. Ridley a annoncé lors de la conférence que la société ouvrirait un bureau aux États-Unis en 2024 pour commercialiser cette #technologie.

#SANFRANCISCO – The first #NASA-funded small satellite for exoplanet science is continuing to gather data well beyond its expected lifetime.

The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment, known as CUTE, a six-unit cubesat equipped with a telescope to funnel data to a spectrograph, traveled to sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit in September 2021 as a secondary payload on the NASA- U.S. Geological Survey Landsat 9 Earth-observation mission.

CUTE was designed to operate in space for at least eight months. Twenty-seven months later, the satellite’s onboard instruments still are observing the dramatic atmospheric loss of “hot jupiters,” gas giants orbiting very close to bright stars

#HELSINKI — Launch startup iSpace has successfully launched and landed a test article, a month after a first hop test, as Chinese reusable rocket efforts intensify.

ISpace’s Hyperbola-2Y methane-liquid oxygen reusable verification stage lifted off from a pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 4:07 a.m. Eastern (1107 UTC) Dec. 10.

The Hyperbola-2Y reached an altitude of 343.12 meters, translating 50 meters to a landing zone and touching down with a velocity of 1.1 meters per second and an accuracy of 0.295 meters. The entire flight lasted 63.15 seconds, according to an iSpace press statement.

The flight came just over a month after a first hop test Nov. 2. That test reached 178 meters and returned to its landing spot. iSpace says it will attempt a test at sea next year after completing ground tests. #spacenews