European Space Agency member states have agreed to keep all production of P120 solid rocket boosters in Italy instead of opening a second production line in Germany.
Germany might be Europe’s best-performing economy and an undisputed engineering powerhouse. But when it comes to space startups, something is amiss.
A member of Germany’s ruling party said the isolationist signals emanating from the Trump White House are reinforcing the need for Europe to be able to go it alone in space.
CNES awarded Airbus Defence and Space a contract worth 30 million euros to build the spacecraft platform and perform payload integration for the French-German Merlin methane-monitoring satellite.
The German Space Center, DLR, and Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) have renewed for another two years their cooperation on SNC’s Dream Chaser lifting-body spacecraft to focus on both crewed and uncrewed mission applications.
Just when it appeared as though European countries, despite all good intentions, were incapable of collaborating more closely on operational satellite programs, along comes word that Germany is buying into France’s next-generation optical satellite reconnaissance system.
U.S. Strategic Command and the German military will share space situational awareness data.
The decision ends an impasse that has bedeviled the European Space Agency for more than two years as it prepares for a Dec. 2 conference of its governments.
ESA is proposing to inject 8 billion euros into Europe’s launch sector over 10 years starting in 2015, including some 4.3 billion euros on a new Ariane 6 rocket.
For startup operators, especially in less-developed nations, the ministry said, the so-called Space Protocol offers the hope of lower prices for space access, much as a similar protocol in existence for aircraft equipment has reduced the cost of aircraft financing by as much as 30 percent.
Germany became the 10th EU nation to join EDA’s program to pool and share purchases of commercial satellite bandwidth for military and government use.
The two sides remain split on whether to complete work on a new upper stage for the Ariane 5 rocket or focus on Ariane 6.
Germany has informed that European Space Agency that German spending on launch vehicles will remain flat for the next decade, a decision that complicates the agency’s already difficult attempt to secure funding and design consensus for a new-generation Ariane rocket
BAE Systems Intelligence and Security will market data from Germany’s TerraSAR-X and TanDem-X radar satellites to the U.S. government under an alliance with the satellites’ owner, Airbus Defence and Space.
DLR did a comparative analysis of Orbital and SpaceX as Europe considers how to adapt the Ariane rocket system to the changing commercial launch market.
DLR Chairman Johann-Dietrich Woerner said negotiations with NASA over SOFIA’s future have taken on an additional urgency because the aircraft will require a substantial maintenance check in June.
