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• Trevor Smith
As launch costs decline, spacecraft design is shifting away from mass as the dominant constraint. The emerging trade space centers on surface area, forcing engineers and operators to reconsider how spacecraft are designed, packaged and optimized for increasingly accessible spaceflight.
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As launch costs decline, spacecraft design is shifting away from mass as the dominant constraint. The emerging trade space centers on surface area, forcing engineers and operators to reconsider how spacecraft are designed, packaged and optimized for increasingly accessible spaceflight.
Reflect Orbital CEO Ben Nowack discusses how the company is addressing growing criticism from astronomers, who have raised concerns about the potential impact of its proposed orbital activities on night-sky observations and the broader astronomical community.
Intuitive Machines said Aug. 13 that it secured a $600 million contract from an undisclosed customer to provide three geostationary-orbit communications satellites. The award expands the company’s satellite business and represents a significant commercial program beyond its lunar exploration activities.
The push to build data centers is extending into lower Earth orbit, creating a potential new market for insurers. Orbital facilities would introduce unfamiliar exposure across launch, spacecraft operations, infrastructure resilience and the increasingly complex risk environment of commercial space.
Novaspace projects that emerging in-orbit services will generate approximately $3 billion in cumulative service revenue over the next 10 years. The forecast points to an early-stage market focused on making space operations more flexible, resilient and sustainable, while the sector continues to develop commercial applications and capabilities.
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The emerging orbital data-center sector is converging on sun-synchronous orbits, intensifying questions over congestion, coordination and operational rules. The development also raises a strategic policy issue for Europe: whether it will help shape the traffic-management framework governing a potentially important new class of space infrastructure.
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The Indian government has selected a consortium led by Pixxel to design, build, own and operate the country’s first privately led Earth-observation satellite constellation, establishing a new commercial space effort with private-sector responsibility across the system’s full lifecycle.
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