Plus: ESCAPADE trajectories expand Mars launch opportunities
| SpaceNews journalists are reporting from SmallSat 2025, held for the first time in Salt Lake City, Utah. We'll be bringing conference highlights to your inbox. For full coverage, go to spacenews.com/small-satellite-2025.
| | | | | By Jeff Foust The head of NASA's science directorate said the agency remains committed to using small satellites to carry out a variety of missions, although those plans face uncertain budgets.
In a keynote at the Small Satellite Conference Aug. 11, Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, highlighted the role that smallsats were playing across the Science Mission Directorate, from Earth science to astrophysics.
"Technologies like smallsats allow us to fly more science at a lower cost and at a quicker pace," she said. "My goal is to put more science into space."
| | | | | | | NASA's ESCAPADE mission, featuring a pair of identical smallsats built by Rocket Lab for the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Lab, is now scheduled to launch later this year on the second flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. Neither NASA nor Blue Origin have yet offered a specific launch date.
Dmitry Poisik, program manager of the office's Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, said Aug. 11 that the system has started to move satellite operators who signed on as beta users to "pilot users" of TraCSS.
Aerospace Corp. is refining technology to enable cubesats to share data through optical links, after demonstrating the capability early this year. Such a move would allow communication at greater distances and to work more autonomously, as the cubesats would use incoming signals to align themselves with one another. | | | | | | | Telespazio Germany announced plans Aug. 12 to enhance its EASE-Rise mission management platform with Digantara space situational awareness (SSA) services and Intella artificial intelligence tools, extending Telespazio's global presence.
French propulsion startup ThrustMe has high expectations for an iodine-fueled Hall-effect thruster set to launch in 2026 on a Marble Imaging satellite built by Reflex Aerospace.
Japanese water propulsion startup Pale Blue is exploring jointly developing systems with Japan's Mitsubishi Electric, after the satellite maker joined the University of Tokyo spin-off's $10 million Series C funding round. Pale Blue co-founder and CEO Jun Asakawa told SpaceNews the funding will help strengthen production and quality control systems to meet rising demand for small satellite propulsion.
| | | | | |  | | We published two new episodes of Space Minds today. First, host Mike Gruss spoke with Umbra COO Todd Master about the evolving small satellite market, supply chain challenges and the company's expansion from SAR data services into satellite components. In a separate episode, Gruss spoke with Alba Orbital founder and CEO Tom Walkinshaw about trends in satellite miniaturization, challenges of launch and supply chains and strategies for building reliable, commercially viable spacecraft. | | | | | | Sign up for our other newsletters -
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