The European Commission is joining forces with the European Space Agency and Europe’s investment arm to help more space companies get financing, including from a largely untapped multi-billion-dollar fund for strategic investments.
Space race 2.0: why Europe is joining the new dash to the moon
The European Space Agency’s plan to build a cargo vessel that can convert to a crew ship is one giant step in its ambitions to compete with rival lunar exploration programmes
Was there perhaps a problem with the fuel feed system, I wonder?
Also, #NASA is apparently beginning to doubt if Starship can still meet the deadlines and get its licence + human rating in time.
Frankly, things are not looking too good for either #Starship or #Artemis right now. Jim Free doesn't seem happy or even hopeful at all.
Are you a highly motivated university student in engineering, science, sociology, industrial design or business administration with a keen interest in technology and innovation? The ESA Education Office is looking for university students to participate in the third edition of the ESA Academy’s Technology Transfer, Application & Innovation Workshop. Developed in close collaboration with the ESA Commercialisation Department, the workshop will be held this year at the ESA Academy’s Training & Learning Facility in ESEC-Galaxia, Transinne, Belgium, from 23 to 26 January 2024.
European Space Agency pushes for space debris treaty
The European Space Agency (ESA) is expected to put a Zero Debris Charter, dealing with “junk” orbiting the Earth, on the table at a meeting of EU space ministers this week, amid mounting concerns over the increasingly overcrowded space.
Is it a spacecraft? An asteroid? Well, both. This small central speck is the first image of a spacecraft on its way home, carrying with it a sample from an asteroid hundreds-of-millions, if-not-billions-of-years old. The spacecraft is NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the asteroid is Bennu.
On Sunday 24 September, the mission will drop its rocky sample off to fall through Earth’s atmosphere and land safely back home, before it continues on to study the once rather scary asteroid Apophis.
Spotted on 16 September by ESA’s Optical Ground Station (OGS) telescope in Tenerife, OSIRIS-REx was 4.66 million km from Earth. This image is a combination of 90 individual images, each 36-second exposures. They have been combined in a way that takes into account the motion of the spacecraft, which is not travelling in a straight line, causing the seemingly stretched background stars to curve and warp.
ESA’s 1-metres OGS telescope was originally built to observe space debris in orbit and test laser communication technologies, but since broadened its horizons to also conduct surveys and follow-up observations of near-Earth asteroids and make night-time astronomy observations and has even discovered dozens of minor planets.
For this observation, ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) took over the reins, directing it at the returning asteroid explorer. The NEOCC, part of the Agency’s Planetary Defence Office, is a little like Europe’s asteroid sorting hat; the centre and its experts are scanning the skies for risky space rocks, computing their orbits and calculating their risk of impact.
From our small but mighty Space Safety telescope, we say ‘Hello, OSIRIS-REx, good luck NASA and welcome safely to Earth, asteroid Bennu!’.
(Read all about ESA’s Hera mission that launches next year to examine the first test of asteroid deflection, the first mission to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system.)
The Ariane 5 rocket is taking off for the last time. It's the end of an era for a launch vehicle that helped establish Europe as a major player in the space industry.