Plus: Germany's big spend on SAR
| By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: Trump signs space policy executive order hours after Isaacman is sworn in, Germany to spend nearly $2 billion on SAR imagery services, HawkEye 360 raises funding to make an acquisition and more.
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| | | | | | Top Stories
President Trump signed an executive order Thursday tackling a range of civil and national security space topics. The "Ensuring American Space Superiority" order directs NASA to return humans to the moon by 2028 and begin "initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost" by 2030. It also reaffirms plans to retire the International Space Station and to develop a nuclear reactor for the moon. In addition, the order emphasizes defending U.S. interests from Earth orbit through cislunar space, integrating commercial capabilities into the defense architecture and modernizing the nation's military space architecture. Much of the executive order was focused on policies and procedures, such as acquisition reform. The order also effectively shutters the National Space Council and amends a 2018 policy on space traffic management, deleting provisions that directed that basic space situational awareness services be provided by the government for free. [SpaceNews]
The order came hours after Jared Isaacman was sworn in as NASA administrator. Isaacman was sworn in by a district judge in a private ceremony at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building Thursday, a day after the Senate confirmed Isaacman's nomination. Isaacman later attended the executive order signing at the Oval Office. Isaacman said in a social media post that he "will intensely focus the agency on achieving the near-impossible" and added that he planned to donate his salary to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center's Space Camp. Isaacman is scheduled to hold a town hall meeting with NASA employees today. [NASA | X @rookisaacman]
A joint venture between Germany's Rheinmetall and Finnish synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite maker Iceye has secured a $1.9 billion contract from the German military. Rheinmetall Iceye Space Solutions said Thursday it will build and operate a SAR satellite constellation to provide persistent surveillance and reconnaissance data for the German military, with a focus on NATO's eastern flank. The joint venture will own and operate the SAR constellation, supply imagery, manage ground infrastructure and provide analytical services under the contract, which runs through 2030. Satellite production is set to begin in the third quarter of 2026 at a new facility in Neuss, Germany. The German government announced this fall it planned to spend more than $40 billion on military space capabilities over the next five years. [SpaceNews]
HawkEye 360 raised $150 million in a new funding round, using some of the proceeds to acquire a defense contractor. HawkEye 360 announced Thursday the Series E debt and equity round, co-led by existing investors Night Dragon and Center15 Capital, with additional debt financing by Silicon Valley Bank, Pinegrove Venture Capital Partners and Hercules Capital. The company is using some of the funds to acquire defense contractor Innovative Signal Analysis (ISA), which specializes in electronic signal and image processing systems for U.S. government customers. HawkEye 360 sells radio-frequency geolocation data collected by its satellites, primarily to the U.S. military, intelligence agencies and allied governments. It said the acquisition strengthens HawkEye 360's position in defense and intelligence by combining space-based RF collection with advanced processing across multiple domains. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | | Other News
Blue Origin scrubbed a New Shepard launch Thursday because of a last-minute technical issue. The company halted the countdown for the NS-37 launch about a minute before the planned 11:30 a.m. Eastern liftoff from the company's West Texas facility, and later called off the launch for the day. The company said only that controllers found "an issue with our built-in checks prior to the flight" that caused the scrub. The launch has been rescheduled for Saturday at 9 a.m. Eastern. The NS-37 suborbital flight is carrying six people, including Michaela "Michi" Benthaus, a German engineer who would become the first person who uses a wheelchair to go to space. [GeekWire]
Astrobotic announced $17.5 million in government contracts Friday to support work on three suborbital vehicles. The awards, from NASA, the U.S. Space Force and the Air Force Research Laboratory, will go toward development of two new versions of Xodiac, the company's low-altitude vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle, as well as Xogdor, a new vehicle capable of going to altitudes above 100 kilometers. One of the Xodiac vehicles will be used for testing rotating detonation rocket engines, while the other will be used for testing of landing technologies for lunar and other spacecraft. [SpaceNews]
Astronomers have observed the collision of two asteroids in another solar system. Hubble Space Telescope observations two decades ago showed evidence of what astronomers thought at the time was a giant planet orbiting the nearby star Fomalhaut. Hubble observations taken two years ago, though, no longer showed evidence of that planet, Fomalhaut b, but instead a separate object. Astronomers now think that both Fomalhaut b and the new object are instead clouds of debris from collisions of large asteroids orbiting the star. The observations suggest such collisions are far more frequent than predicted by models of solar system formation. [New Scientist]
A NASA astronaut is retiring from the agency more than 20 years after his only space flight. NASA said Thursday that Lee Morin is retiring from the agency after 30 years of service. Morin was selected as an astronaut in 1996 and flew on the STS-110 shuttle mission in 2002, performing two spacewalks to install a truss segment on the International Space Station. Morin then worked on technology development programs at the Johnson Space Center, including development of crew displays for the ISS and Orion. [NASA]
| | | | | FROM SPACENEWS |  | | Speed, risk, and the future of national security space: In this episode of Space Minds, host Mike Gruss moderates a panel discussion at the Spacepower conference on how commercial space capabilities are reshaping national security, civil space and military decision-making with Luke Fischer, CEO and co-founder of SkyFi, Bob Pavelko, executive director of national security space programs for Intuitive Machines, and Bradley Cheetham, CEO and co-founder of Advanced Space. Watch or listen now. | | | | | | Don't Nuke the Fun Object
| "YR4 is a fun object. I don't want people to think about nuking it. It's a fun object."
| | – Andy Rivkin, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, during a session of the AGU Annual Meeting this week discussing studies of asteroid 2024 YR4. That small asteroid currently has a 4% chance of hitting the moon in 2032, prompting talk of concepts to deflect or disrupt it.
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