Author: starpathwp-production
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Taiwan Moves to Exempt Starlink From Ownership Rules to Shore Up Wartime Connectivity
Beijing claims Taiwan as its territory and has ramped up military pressure in recent years. Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom has already struck deals with several foreign satellite companies, including European firm Eutelsat, to provide back-up telecommunications in case of war or natural disaster. Starlink, which dominates the global satellite communications sector with thousands of satellites in…
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South Korea Commits 40B Won to OTV Race Already Underway
Is South Korea Too Late to the Orbital Transfer Vehicle Market? South Korea’s government is committing 40 billion won to develop and demonstrate a flight-model orbital transfer vehicle by 2029 — entering a space logistics race that Impulse Space, D-Orbit, and Rocket Lab USA have been running for years. The Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA) is…
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Skyroot’s Vikram-1 Reaches Orbit on Debut Flight, a First for Indian Commercial Rockets
The launch, called Mission Aagaman, Sanskrit for “arrival,” lifted off at 2:35 a.m. Eastern from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, India’s main spaceport. The liftoff was delayed by 35 minutes due to a technical issue found at the T-minus 5-minute point in the countdown. Skyroot went into the launch cautiously optimistic while acknowledging the track…
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UK Loses 340 Million Pounds on Eutelsat OneWeb Starlink Bet
The UK government backed OneWeb as a strategic national asset and a hedge against dependence on Starlink. That bet is now visibly failing in financial terms, arriving in the same week that other governments moved to clear paths for Starlink to operate on their territory. Eutelsat OneWeb was intended to compete directly with Starlink in…
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NASA Sets August 30 Launch for Roman Space Telescope on Falcon Heavy
The Roman telescope is named after NASA’s first chief astronomer. It was built and tested at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NASA describes the observatory as having a deep, panoramic view of the cosmos, generating never-before-seen pictures intended to revolutionize understanding of the universe. Roman’s vast, deep surveys will explore dark…
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Pentagon Awards $7.1M to Scale Satellite Cover Glass in Ohio
Is U.S. Satellite Solar Cell Glass a National Security Vulnerability? $7.1 million. That is what the Pentagon judged it worth to shore up domestic supply of one of the most overlooked consumables in spacecraft manufacturing: radiation-resistant cover glass for satellite solar arrays. The award, made July 17 under Title III of the Defense Production Act,…
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Arianespace Chief Urges EU or Germany to Order Ariane 6 in Blocks of 10 to 20
Cavaillolès made the comments to German defence publication Hartpunkt during a broader discussion of rising demand for military satellite launches. He pointed to a September 2025 speech by German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, who announced 35 billion euros in spending on space related defence projects, describing it as a turning point for launch demand. Cavaillolès…
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JAXA RV-X Completes 10m Hop Test at Noshiro
Did JAXA Just Fly Japan’s First Reusable Rocket Prototype? JAXA’s RV-X experimental vehicle lifted 10 meters off a concrete pad at the Noshiro test facility on July 11, 2026 — a 40-second hop that marks Japan’s first successful flight of a reusable rocket prototype. The 7.3-meter-tall, single-engine vehicle rose just over 10 meters, translated approximately…
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Will Russia’s answer to the Falcon 9 rocket ever take flight?
Everyone seems to be launching and landing rockets these days. Last week, China joined the club of countries that have launched an orbital mission and brought its booster safely back to Earth, which is just the beginning of public and private ventures in that country aggressively pushing into rocket reuse. Also in Asia, Japan’s space…
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Google-backed satellites for wildfire detection launch as smoke chokes US, Canada
As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year. The…