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WASHINGTON – As Maxar Technologies’ satellites continue to collect images of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the company is working with customers so it can allocate more capacity to meet U.S. government needs, said Maxar’s CEO Daniel Jablonsky.

With four satellites in orbit, “a lot of times we don’t have a lot of spare capacity,” Jablonsky said in an interview last week at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

“But we made accommodations with some of our other customers to be able to surge capacity for the U.S. and allies,” he said. The company also gets about 200 requests a day for imagery from news media organizations.

The first 3D model of Earth’s magnetosphere could help us better understand how satellites cope with space weather.

Researchers used radiative cooling to generate enough to power LEDs or charge a cell phone.

NASA has agreed to test startup SpinLaunch’s kinetic launcher, a giant circular accelerator that aims to shoot 200 kilogram satellites into space.

The California-based SpinLaunch’s launcher is located at the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico where it will carry out a test flight with NASA later this year, according to the firm.

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SpinLaunch says it will launch a NASA payload later this year after signing an agreement with the space agency.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service became the center of a global outage earlier today, with services having resumed soon after.

The night sky has been a source of information and wonder since the dawn of humankind — and it looks almost the same now as it did then.

But the night sky as we know it is on the precipice of changing dramatically due to the proliferation of satellites just a few hundred miles above Earth.

“For the first time in human history, we’re not going to have access to the night sky in the way that we’ve seen it,” Samantha Lawler, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Regina in Canada, said.

COLORADO SPRINGS — Megaconstellation startup E-Space is preparing to deploy the first of potentially hundreds of thousands of satellites on a Rocket Lab mission slated for no earlier than April 19.

Three E-space prototypes are part of the 34 payloads that Rocket Lab said April 5 are on the upcoming mission, including satellites for Alba Orbital, Astrix Astronautics, Aurora Propulsion Technologies, Unseenlabs and Swarm Technologies.

Rocket Lab will also attempt a mid-air helicopter capture of its Electron launch vehicle for the first time after the flight. The launch is set to commence within a 14-day window starting on April 19 and represents a major step in Rocket Lab’s plans to make the rocket reusable.

COLORADO SPRINGS — A shortage of Ukrainian Antonov aircraft raises the prospect of more delays for satellite projects already bogged down by supply chain issues.

Satellite manufacturers make heavy use of large cargo space on Antonovs to transport GEO spacecraft from factory to launch site.

But some Antonovs have been destroyed amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, noted Mark Quinn, head of Willis Towers Watson’s satellite insurance business, and those that are in service tend to be owned by Russian air cargo companies subject to Western sanctions or are being used to support the war effort.

San Francisco-based startup Astranis has purchased a dedicated launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, eschewing the less expensive “ride-share” model favored by new space companies for an exclusive mission that Astranis says will put its package of four communications satellites closer to their target orbit in a much faster amount of time.

“We’re actually using substantially less than the max capability of a Falcon 9,” Astranis CEO and founder John Gedmark explained. “This is just four small satellites that [will be] on there. So we’re actually able to use all of that extra performance to put those four satellites much closer to GEO than you would normally be able to do with with this kind of launch.”

How much faster? At least twice as fast, cutting down the time from up to six months to as little as three months. Purchasing a dedicated launch on a Falcon 9 — a first amongst space companies — also means that Astranis will have much more control over when the rocket takes off and the payload insertion orbit.