January 2021
Safeguarding space - lessons from decommissioning in the energy industry
... the big question remains - how can the removal of satellites from orbit be encouraged among the global space community? A well-documented collision between the Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian military spacecraft in 2009 caused...
March 2021
Space weather and risk mitigation
..., which is supported by the whole spectrum of existing space assets including the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), communication satellites, Earth observation systems, space probes and even CubeSats. Therefore, the operation of the whole...
December 2021
The rise of the UK space economy
... in which they reside, but there are also significant potential societal benefits to providing low-cost communications, satellite broadband and other services to less-well developed regions that ground-based infrastructure cannot support. However...
May 2022
China’s international collaboration in space: an evolving approach from the Middle Kingdom
... have cost some two percent of GDP). The global satcom industry has also seen a downturn in GEO communications satellite orders since the mid-2010s, partly due to fewer countries purchasing so-called ‘PrideSats’. Indeed, the most...
September 2025
Iran’s ascent - a space power in the shadow of sanctions
...to listen in on the Soviet space programme from the south shore of the Caspian Sea (in 1956), access to Intelsat communications satellites (in 1969) and Landsat remote sensing (in 1972). Iran was, like China, a scientific civilisation long before the...
November 2025
Extra-terrestrial Skyring: managing space debris with an artificial planetary ring
...provide global coverage of the Earth’s surface, except for the polar regions. This helped to create the communications satellite age. In the case of an Extraterrestrial Skyring, if the clumping was well managed, but in a 1:2 resonance orbit at 26,500...
