04/18/2025 | Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, The Space Force released a new warfighting guide, debate reignites over Space Command HQ's location, Blue Origin launched a flight of celebrities, and more. | Our Top Story | | |
|
|
|
| |  | By Sandra Erwin, April 17, 2025
| The U.S. Space Force on April 17 released its most explicit blueprint yet for how it plans to defend American satellites โ and, if necessary, take aim at enemy space systems โ in the event of conflict.
The document, titled "Space Warfighting: A Framework for Planners," outlines how U.S. forces might assert control of the orbital high ground through a range of offensive and defensive operations, reflecting an evolution in how the military thinks about warfare beyond Earth.
"This document is very specific to space superiority," said Lt. Gen. Shawn Bratton, the Space Force's deputy chief of space operations for strategy, plans, programs and requirements. Read More |  | Other News From the Week | LAUNCH | Minotaur IV rocket launches spy payloads for National Reconnaissance Office A Northrop Grumman Minotaur IV rocket successfully launched multiple classified payloads for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office on April 16, marking a return to Vandenberg Space Force Base for the solid-fueled launch vehicle after more than a decade. Read More
Blue Origin launches all-woman New Shepard suborbital flight The NS-31 mission, the company's 11th crewed suborbital flight, flew a routine profile but with a unique complement of spaceflight participants. It was the company's first mission to carry only women, and the first all-woman spaceflight of any kind since Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space on a solo flight in 1963. Read More | | | Loving SpaceNews This Week? Check out SpaceNext: AI, where we look at how artificial intelligence is becoming integral to the space industry, and how companies and agencies are using it for their missions. | | | MILITARY | Space Force eases entry for commercial firms with layered launch standards The U.S. Space Force is changing how it evaluates risk for launch missions, using tiered mission assurance standards that could expand opportunities for newer commercial providers. Under the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 procurement strategy, the Space Force has adopted a tiered approach to "mission assurance" โ a classification system that calibrates the amount of oversight required for each launch based on its risk profile and the importance of its payload. Read More
Space Command headquarters battle reignites The years-long political tug-of-war over the permanent home of U.S. Space Command headquarters has flared up again, with House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) claiming the Trump administration is poised to reverse a Biden-era decision and relocate the command from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama. Read More | | | CIVIL | NASA safety panel warns of increasing risks to ISS operations During a public meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel April 17, members said they were "deeply concerned" about the safety of the aging International Space Station, citing long-running issues and funding shortfalls as the station nears its projected end in 2030. Read More
Mission team details complex rescue of Chinese lunar spacecraft A team behind the rescue of a pair of lunar satellites, the DRO-A and DRO-B spacecraft, left stranded by a launch anomaly have revealed the challenges they faced in salvaging the mission. The pair were designed to link up with the earlier-launched DRO-L satellite, operating in low Earth orbit, to test intersatellite links and demonstrate the utility of distant retrograde orbits, but suffered an anomaly that left them in a highly elliptical Earth orbit. Read More | | |
|  | OPINION |
|  | By Mathew Lewallen, April 14, 2025
| On a clear evening this January, flights out of Miami, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale suddenly ground to a halt. The culprit wasn't weather or a software glitch โ it was a rocket launch. SpaceX's Starship, the largest spacecraft ever built, had lifted off from Texas and exploded mid-flight, raining 100 tons of debris at over 13,250 miles per hour over the Caribbean. The FAA swiftly issued an unprecedented order: a temporary freeze on air traffic at four major Florida airports. Then another Starship exploded on its next test launch in March.
According to FAA data reported by Reuters, the disruption affected about 240 flights with delays averaging 28 minutes, forcing 28 of those aircraft to divert, and left 40 airborne flights in holding patterns. Passengers as far away as Philadelphia felt the shockwave in scheduling. It was a dramatic wake-up call that our airspace is no longer the exclusive domain of airplanes. Rockets have arrived, and the system isn't ready. These incidents aren't a fluke โ they're a glimpse into what happens when rockets and airplanes share the same sky. Read More
In-flight connectivity โ where national policy and global service (don't) mix
By Juan Cacace
Moon, Mars โ China leads to both
By Louis Friedman
| SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community's diverse perspectives. Whether you're an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion@spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. The perspectives shared in these op-eds are solely those of the authors. | | |  | Publish your press release with SpaceNews' premier press release service and start seeing results today.
| Latest Press Releases |
|
|
|
Sponsored Post |  | By L3Harris
GPS is not only a cornerstone to our military superiority, it is foundational to our national and global economic stability. In fact, analysts warn that GPS outages could cost our economy $1 billion per day. Once the world's sole global navigation satellite system, GPS now competes with international alternatives. While the U.S. continues investing in GPS modernization, other nations have been more aggressive in adopting new technologies and expanding their satellite networks.
Recently, our adversaries have deployed sophisticated efforts to disrupt, deny and degrade U.S. Precision, Navigation and Timing (PNT) advantages. The conflict in Ukraine offers a sobering wake-up call where advanced electronic warfare capabilities have effectively degraded or denied GPS-guided weapons and unmanned vehicles. This isn't a theoretical threat โ it's happening today, and if we want to dominate on the battlefield, we will need to have a PNT solution that is seamless and adaptive. Read More
| | |
|
| What's New With SpaceNews? |  | Check out the latest episode of our new podcast, Space Minds. Join David Ariosto, Mike Gruss and journalists from the SpaceNews team for compelling interviews with scientists, founders and experts who love to talk about space, and their takes on the week's biggest news.
New episodes come out every Thursday on SpaceNews.com, YouTube and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
|
|
| | | | |
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment