October 2015
Baikonur, Kibo and beyond: Japan’s leading role in space
... the ISS programme, Japan has been devoting a lot of other resources to space exploration. The probe Hayabusa (‘Falcon’) landed on asteroid Itokawa and returned to Earth in June 2010 with asteroid samples seven years after the...
March 2016
Space industrialisation needs balanced legal and policy approach
... that its interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty permits exploration and extraction operations. Launch of SpaceX Falcon 9 on 4 March 2016 Finally, and compounding the international difficulties of the SREU Act, Congress is uncertain as to which...
August 2016
Smallsat launch strategy
... allows smaller payloads to get access to launch vehicles that are oversized for their needs, such as the Falcon 9, Antares, Atlas V and Soyuz. Despite the wide range of launch opportunities available there is no one option that...
September 2016
Small launcher market survey
... companies reinventing the model for launching small satellites into space, recently announced the purchase of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and the expansion of its launch services to include dedicated rideshare missions. Its first dedicated rideshare...
January 2017
Elon Musk and Mars - looking for a snowball effect
... stars.” Grateful to NASA But entering the space arena was not easy going, and after his Falcon 1 rocket had repeatedly failed it was a contract from NASA which saved his company: “I just want to say...
April 2017
Sky-fi dawn of the space internet era
... internet but unfortunately, AMOS-6 was destroyed on the launch pad when its launch vehicle, the SpaceX Falcon 9, exploded on 1 September 2016. Orbiting Earth Several companies have begun to experiment with their own ideas on how...
