Plus: Priorities for the new head of the UK Space Agency
| By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: NASA is not fooling around with the new Artemis 2 launch date, China advances its Mars sample return mission, the new head of the U.K. Space Agency discusses her priorities and more.
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| | | | | | Top Stories
NASA announced Thursday it now plans to launch the Artemis 2 mission as soon as April 1. The agency concluded a flight readiness review and officials said they were ready to proceed with a launch in a window between April 1 and 6. The decision comes after completing repairs to a helium line for the Space Launch System upper stage that suffered a blockage, requiring rolling the vehicle from the pad for repairs. The vehicle is scheduled to roll back out to the pad March 19. [SpaceNews]
Voyager Technologies is opening a new manufacturing facility in Southern California. The company announced Thursday it set up the 140,000-square-foot site in Long Beach, California, to support development and production of electronics, software and propulsion technologies used in spacecraft and defense systems. The move places Voyager alongside a growing cluster of aerospace firms in Long Beach and the broader Los Angeles region. The company is expanding in California and elsewhere as it seeks roles in the Golden Dome missile defense initiative. [SpaceNews]
A Chinese Mars sample return mission is entering the construction phase. Work on the Tianwen-3 mission is on track for a launch in late 2028 after engineers achieved breakthroughs in key technologies, officials said Thursday. The multi-spacecraft mission will use two Long March 5 launches from Earth in late 2028, one carrying a lander and ascent vehicle and the other a Mars orbiter and Earth return spacecraft. Tianwen-3 is designed to return at least 500 grams of Martian samples to Earth in 2031. [SpaceNews]
A startup that generates synthetic satellite imagery to train AI models has raised a seed round. Vienna-based Another Earth raised $4 million this week to accelerate the deployment of software it is already providing commercially to geospatial analysis firms. That software creates large amounts of synthetic satellite imagery to train AI models that are then used to analyze actual imagery. The company seeks to assist the broader Earth observation industry that it believes is bottlenecked by a lack of high-quality training data. [SpaceNews]
The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance the nomination of Matt Anderson as NASA deputy administrator. The committee voted 23-5 to send Anderson's nomination to the full Senate for a final confirmation vote. The five no votes all came from Democratic members of the committee. The vote came a week after Anderson faced little opposition from committee members at a confirmation hearing. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | | Other News
China conducted a pair of launches hours apart Thursday. A Long March 8A lifted off at 3:48 p.m. Eastern from the commercial spaceport on Hainan carrying the 20th set of Guowang broadband constellation satellites. Officials did not disclose the number of satellites on the launch, but previous Long March 8A launches for Guowang carried nine satellites each. A Long March 2D rocket lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 6:33 p.m. Eastern and placed into orbit the Shiyan-30 03 and 04 spacecraft. Official media said the satellites will be used to test Earth observation technologies. The launches were the first in a month from China after a break for the Chinese New Year holiday. [SpaceNews]
A Cygnus cargo spacecraft departed from the International Space Station Thursday. The NG-23 Cygnus was unberthed from the station by the Canadarm2 robotic arm and released at 7:06 a.m. Eastern. The spacecraft had been at the station for nearly six months and will perform a destructive reentry on Saturday. A new Cygnus spacecraft is scheduled to launch to the station next month. [Space.com]
The new head of the U.K. Space Agency is prioritizing growth of the country's space sector and national security. In an interview, Rebecca Evernden said the focus on growth and national security is because the government believes those areas will have the most impact, particularly in topics such as satellite communications and in-space servicing. Launch also remains a priority despite the bankruptcy of Orbex. The agency is in the process of being absorbed into the U.K. government's Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, but Evernden said the agency will maintain its technical expertise and collaborate with other nations' space agencies. [SpaceNews]
The head of Amazon Leo's government services business has left the company. Rick Freeman, who had been vice president at Amazon overseeing Amazon Leo for Government, left the company in late February, the company confirmed. Amazon Leo for Government is the unit charged with sales of Amazon Leo broadband services to government customers. Amazon has not announced a replacement for Freeman. [Breaking Defense]
A cubesat designed to help look for habitable exoplanets has returned its first images. The Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat, or SPARCS, cubesat launched in January on a SpaceX rideshare mission. The 6U cubesat carries an ultraviolet camera that astronomers will use to monitor low-mass stars to measure the amount of stellar activity they have. That will help them determine how suitable any planets that orbit them are for hosting life. [NASA/JPL]
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| "Unlike NASA, which I know well and where I could go in with a brand and tell everybody everything that we do, when we talk about the NRO, all I can do is say, 'We do cool stuff in space.'"
| | – Chris Scolese, director of the National Reconnaissance Office and a former NASA associate administrator, discussing efforts to recruit employees at the NRO during a talk at the Goddard Space Science Symposium on Thursday.
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