Category: Space Exploration

Global Rise of Private Spaceflight Companies The once government-only arena of spaceflight is now a thriving global industry fueled by private companies. In 2023, the global space economy reached $570 billion, nearly double its size a decade earlier spacefoundation.org. Commercial ventures account for ~78% of this economy spacefoundation.org, reflecting how companies worldwide are taking the…
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Figure 1: Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander (bronze, top) and its rideshare payloads are shown inside a SpaceX Falcon 9 fairing prior to launch spaceflightnow.com. AstroForge’s Brokkr‑2 spacecraft (renamed Odin, gold box at bottom center) was attached beneath Athena for this flight. Odin’s mission was to fly by a near-Earth asteroid to scout its composition, specifically to confirm…
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India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission (launched July 2023) achieved a historic soft landing near the Moon’s south pole on August 23, 2023 space.com. Its primary objectives were to demonstrate safe, precise landing and a mobile rover to conduct in‑situ science on the lunar surface isro.gov.in. The mission carried a lander (Vikram) and a six-wheeled rover (Pragyan) equipped with instruments…
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Blue Origin is a private aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000, with a mission to enable commercial human space travel. Its New Shepard suborbital rocket has been conducting crewed tourist flights since 2021, and its New Glenn heavy orbital rocket made its first successful launch in January 2025 en.wikipedia.org. These activities have generated…
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The Satellite IoT (Internet of Things) revolution is kicking into high gear, promising to connect millions of devices in the most remote corners of the globe. By leveraging satellite networks for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, this burgeoning sector is extending the internet’s reach far beyond terrestrial cell towers. Analysts forecast explosive growth in the coming years…
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Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly intertwined with modern space technology, enabling spacecraft and satellites to operate more autonomously and efficiently than ever before. From helping Mars rovers navigate alien terrain to processing vast streams of Earth observation data in orbit, AI techniques like machine learning and automated planning are revolutionizing how we explore and…
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Company History and Founding SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) was founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk in 2002. Musk invested $100 million of his own money (from his PayPal sale) to start the company, driven by a vision of dramatically reducing space launch costs and enabling the colonization of Mars. The initial motivation came after Musk’s…
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High above Earth, in the crowded expanse of geosynchronous orbit (GEO) some 22,300 miles up, a set of American satellites quietly keeps watch. These are the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites – often dubbed “neighborhood watch” satellites – and they form a covert but crucial line of defense in space. Born in secrecy…
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