Space situational awareness (SSA), for all its challenges, is relatively mature in LEO and GEO. In comparison, the situation beyond GEO is chaotic. No organization is charged with maintaining SSA for deep space objects either in distant Earth orbit or beyond Earth orbit. There is no formal interface between the astronomers who accidentally detect deep space objects while searching for asteroids and the astronautics community. Organizations such as JPL keep track of their own active probes but not of their discarded rocket stages nor the probes of other nations. This situation has been tenable due to the low flight rate of deep space missions to date, but that is changing with the arrival of commercial lunar missions and deep space cubesats, and the increasing number of states carrying out deep space exploration. I present a historical database of about 1000 deep space objects and argue that the time has come to plan for internationally coordinated deep space traffic management.

As a service to the satellite user community, CelesTrak provides the Space Track TLE Retriever—a tool which allows users with an active Space Track account to easily download Space Track data sets and use them to generate standard CelesTrak data sets. The Space Track TLE Retriever is a standalone Windows-based application which can be run manually, as needed, or set up to automatically download and generate CelesTrak data sets. All downloaded data is automatically archived for the user.

Get yourself a heat shield, and throw the parcel really hard—backward. //

The Earth’s atmosphere weighs as much as a layer of water 10 meters thick. To figure out whether a meteor is likely to make it through, you can imagine that it’s literally hitting a 10-meter layer of water. If the object weighs more than the water it would have to push aside to reach the surface, it will probably make it through. This works pretty well for a rough approximation!

“This is a NASA Spacecraft antenna. Its peculiar shape was designed by a computer. It's called an evolved antenna because it was designed a computer program that uses an evolutionary algorithm that mimics Darwinian evolution.”

British internet infrastructure company OneWeb has acquired a set of first-come, first-served rights from the International Telecommunication Union.

According to comments made to a member of the space industry by a RUAG spokesperson, the prominent aerospace supplier may have finally reached an agreement with SpaceX to manufacture a handful of larger payload fairings for future Falcon 9 and Heavy launches. In the likely event that SpaceX is one of two contractors awarded a […] //

European company RUAG has effectively cornered the Western rocket fairing market, with SpaceX being the only Western launch company currently building its own fairings. RUAG builds fairings for both Arianespace’s Ariane 5 and Vega rockets and ULA’s Atlas V. Additionally, RUAG will build and supply fairings for both companies’ next-gen rockets – Arianespace’s Ariane 6 and ULA’s Vulcan – and builds fairings for a number of smallsat launch companies.

See photos from the 60-satellite launch!

The case of the unknown satellites

SpaceX has always claimed that the design of its Starlink satellites would evolve. Now, it says that, at the most, the first 75 Starlinks will include an iron thruster and steel reaction wheels likely to survive re-entry. Any built subsequently will “use components that will demise fully in the atmosphere,” wrote the company. No satellites at all will be deployed with the silicon carbide components described in its initial filing.