Plus: Isaacman wants to rebuild NASA's workforce
| Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, Elon Musk claims SpaceX can build a lunar city in 10 years, Jared Isaacman wants to rebuild NASA's workforce, Germany is developing a control center for space exploration, Ariane 64 flies for the first time and more.
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| | | | | OUR TOP STORY
| | By Jeff Foust Roughly one year after dismissing the moon as a "distraction," Elon Musk says SpaceX will focus on lunar settlement before sending humans to Mars.
In a social media post Feb. 8, Musk said SpaceX was deferring its long-held ambitions of establishing a permanent human presence on Mars, instead devoting resources to creating a "self-growing city" on the moon.
"For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20-plus years," he wrote.
Neither Musk nor SpaceX has discussed detailed plans for such a settlement on the moon. The company has instead long been associated with establishing a large-scale human presence on Mars using the Starship vehicle SpaceX is developing.
| | | | | | | LAUNCH
| | Ariane 64, the more powerful version of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket, successfully placed a group of Amazon Leo broadband satellites into orbit on the vehicle's inaugural launch Feb. 12.
A Falcon 9 launched a new crew to the International Space Station Feb. 13 to start a busy schedule of arriving and departing vehicles at the station.
China launched its experimental reusable spacecraft for the fourth time late Friday, once again maintaining strict secrecy around the mission. The mission will attract interest and scrutiny, particularly in terms of future maneuvers, the release of subsatellites and any subsequent rendezvous and proximity operations.
China took a step forward in its lunar and human spaceflight programs late Tuesday with successful in-flight abort and rocket recovery tests. A Mengzhou spacecraft received the abort command from the rocket and successfully separated and escaped from a Long March 10 launch vehicle.
| | CIVIL
| | After losing about 20% of its civil servant workforce in the past year, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said on social media the agency plans to bring more expertise in-house and reduce its reliance on contractors.
Amazon received approval Feb. 10 to deploy thousands more broadband satellites, weeks after seeking relief from a July milestone for its first-generation network after reaching only about 11% of the required deployment.
Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder announced Feb. 4 that the German Aerospace Center (DLR) will receive 58 million euros ($69 million) to build a Human Exploration Control Center to support future robotic and human exploration missions. The total cost of the facility is 78 million euros and in addition to the Bavarian funding, DLR will invest 20 million euros from its institutional budget. | | | | | | | COMMERCIAL
| | Stoke Space announced Feb. 10 an extension to a Series D funding round the company closed in October, raising the size of the round from $510 million to $860 million. The company has raised $1.34 billion to date.
United Kingdom-based launch company Orbex announced that its business is folding after multiple attempts to stay solvent fell through.
Eutelsat has signed a 975 million euro ($1.2 billion) France-backed export credit agency financing package to help fund 440 replacement satellites for its OneWeb low Earth orbit broadband constellation. | | | | | | | FROM SPACENEWS |  | | Lower costs and increase access with a group subscription: Get unlimited access to SpaceNews reporting and analysis for your whole team so they can stay up to speed on developments across the industry. With volume discounts, simplified billing and easy user management, setting up your entire organization to follow SpaceNews' journalism is the easiest decision you can make to guarantee that everyone has the intelligence they need for your mission to succeed. Set up access now for as few as two users. | | | | | | | |  | Latest Press Releases
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