Space

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! There was a lot of Starship news this week, thanks in part to an informative Twitter Spaces with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Read on for all the juicy details. In this issue: Environmentalists sue over Starship Nuview’s plan to make a 3D map of the world News fro

Virgin Galactic will return to the skies later this month, in a crewed mission that the company hopes will bring to an end the nearly two-year gap since its first and only crewed flight in July 2021. The space tourism company said Monday it will send a crew of four to space in late May. The main ob

SpaceX's super-heavy launch system Starship is poised to fundamentally reshape the space economy. The 394-foot-tall vehicle, which took to the skies for the first time last month, is designed to carry a staggering amount of mass to low Earth orbit and into deep space. technewss+ spoke with thr

Dozens of established players and newer entrants are competing to bring the most cutting-edge remote sensing data to customers. These companies may use hyperspectral, thermal, radar or optical instruments — but none, as of yet, use light detection and ranging (lidar), a technology that's

Maxar Technologies, the satellite imaging and manufacturing company, has completed its $6.4 billion sale to private equity. The company announced on Wednesday that it was no longer listed on the New York Stock Exchange following the closing of the acquisition by PE firm Advent International and min

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! In this issue: ispace’s lunar lander presumed lost Update on Ursa Major News from Hydrosat and more ispace loses contact with lunar lander seconds before touchdown Japanese company ispace lost communication with its Hakuto-R lander just moments before it w

A coalition of advocacy groups has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over its handling of the environmental assessment of SpaceX's launch plans in southeast Texas. The FAA gave the green-light to SpaceX's Starship launch program last summer, with the sti

SpaceX’s recent Starship test flight, the first during which it flew with its Super Heavy orbital booster, was a bit more of a mess than it even appeared when it ended with a large explosion. During a Twitter Space on Saturday, SpaceX founder and Twitter owner Elon Musk shared more details ab

The prospect of contacting a satellite to send a text or contact emergency services may soon be an effortless reality as startups move from proof of concept to actual product. Canadians on the Rogers network, which just inked a deal with Lynk, will get direct satellite-phone connections across the

Ursa Major has quietly closed $100 million in new funding, according to documents viewed by technewss and multiple sources. Funders to the Series D include BlackRock and Space Capital. The funding was reportedly closed last October. The new capital came less than a year after the c

Japanese company ispace lost communication with its Hakuto-R lander just moments before it was supposed to touch down on the lunar surface. “At this moment, we have not been able to confirm successful landing on the lunar surface,” ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said on the company’s

After five long months journeying through space, ispace's Hakuto-R lander is ready to greet the lunar surface. The Japanese company is expecting to land Hakuto-R at 9:40 AM Pacific time today. If successful, this first mission will no doubt be a huge boon for ispace’s ambitious plans to s

Astra's new Rocket 4 launch vehicle will use Ursa Major's Hadley liquid engine to power its upper stage, the two companies announced Monday. Astra has been tight-lipped about the new upper-stage engine that would power its new Rocket 4, with CEO Chris Kemp only telling investors last year t

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! In this issue: Starship’s successful failure Rocket Lab’s Electron goes suborbital News from Orbit Fab and more SpaceX launches fully stacked Starship for the first time SpaceX launched a fully stacked Starship for the first time on Thursday morning, w