Tag Archives: Space

Scotland is welcoming its biggest ever space industry event next week: the inaugural Space-Comm Expo Scotland, at SEC Glasgow over 11-12 September. The organisers are expecting 3,000 delegates and 70 exhibitors, as well as 100 speakers including representatives from  the European Space Agency, the UK Space Agency, and Ministers from the UK and Scottish Governments. “There are currently an estimated ...

The Andøya Spaceport in Norway has officially received its Launch Site Operator licence from the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries. Less than one year after its opening, the spaceport describes it as another important milestone towards the first launch of satellites from Norwegian soil. Norway is now bidding to become the leading space nation in the Arctic, with ...

AstroForge, the asteroid mining startup, has raised $40 million in Series A funding to “unlock a cost-effective and sustainable mining solution”. The company’s aim is to establish an untapped supply chain of raw materials for use on Earth. The funding round was led by Nova Threshold with participation from 776, Initialized, Caladan, YC, Uncorrelated Ventures and Jed McCaleb. It brings ...

The UK government has released figures for the “size and health” of the UK space industry in 2023, its latest annual report on the UK space sector. Revenue UK space industry income amounted to £18.9bn, it says. And while the industry consists of organisations of all sizes, in terms of space-related income it is highly concentrated, the report notes. Twenty ...

ispace EUROPE has completed the assembly of a flight model of a small lunar rover, described as a micro-rover. It was designed and manufactured in-house in Luxembourg. The European subsidiary of ispace says the micro-rover will next be transported to Japan. Once there, it will installed on the “HAKUTO-R” Mission 2 RESILIENCE Lander, a lunar lander. Micro-rover Dubbed TENACIOUS, the ...

At the Small Satellite Conference in Utah, Imec announced a hyperspectral sensor with an on-chip line-based filter covering 450 – 900nm in 96 bands. It had equidistantly divided spectral bands and, compared with its previous generation, double the TDI (time-delayed-integration) capacity – to 10 line per band. Underneath the filter is a ‘2/3inch’ 2,048pixel image sensor from AMS – the ...

According to the latest report by the Space Foundation, the global space economy in 2023 is valued at $570 billion, an increase of 7.4% from 2022’s total of $531 billion. The US-based nonprofit organisation says – in its Space Report Q2 – that the growth is consistent with the industry’s five-year compound annual growth rate of 7.3%, with the space ...

Sift, a startup providing an “observability platform” for hardware sensor data, has raised $17.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Google Ventures and brings Sift’s total funding to $25 million. The investment will be used to increase its staff, build up its infrastructure and add AI/ML capabilities, said the company. Based in El Segundo, California, Sift ...

Microchip has announced its first 64bit processors, picking the RISC-V instruction set for the initial parts: an octa-core for space and a industrial quad-core. Although, “future PIC64 families will include devices based on RISC-V or Arm architectures”, said the company. PIC64-HPSC is the family name of the space processors, which have come out of a 2022 deal with NASA to ...

Astrobotic, a lunar logistics company, has unveiled its Lunar Surface Proving Ground (LSPG) – a constructed moonscape for testing- at its facility in Mojave, California. Measuring 100mx100m, the “high-fidelity 3D test field” mimics the topography and optical properties of the Moon’s surface, said the company. The site will be used for testing spacecraft and rover sensors, for example lunar landing ...