KBR has been awarded a $300 million, cost-plus-fixed-fee recompete contract for scientific, engineering and technical services in support of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. "With our systems engineering, science and IT expertise, KBR stands ready to support EROS in meeting its future challenges," said Stuart Bradie, KBR president and CEO. 

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has incorporated a propulsion technology built by NASA into a spacecraft designed to support the agency's demonstration of its first planetary defense capability.

SpaceX has sent to space a satellite designed to monitor sea levels across the globe under a U.S.-U.K. partnership. The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a mission to collect sea level data, support ship navigation and inform weather forecasts, NASA said Sunday.

A NASA space probe built by Lockheed Martin landed on the surface of a near-Earth asteroid Tuesday to take a physical sample using the craft's robotic arm.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle has launched two Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory experiments as part of an effort to assess the capacity of commercial technologies for suborbital tracking.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, said the company has begun preparations to develop a permanent human settlement on Mars with SpaceX’s Starship rocket. Musk has projected that SpaceX’s first uncrewed mission to Mars could occur in a minimum of four years. SpaceX’s Starship vehicle is a reusable rocket-and-spacecraft combo that is currently under development at the company's South Texas facility.

Alan Stern, associate vice president of the space science and engineering division at Southwest Research Institute, has been selected to join a scientific team that will fly aboard a Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo vehicle to carry out NASA-backed experiments.

Maxar Technologies has been awarded a potential eight-year, $49 million, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract by the U.S. Army Geospatial Center to deliver portable, direct-downlink tactical ground systems that will provide critical geospatial intelligence to users in remote locations. The contract includes two initial task orders worth a combined $8 million.

Lockheed Martin has partnered with the University of Colorado Boulder to launch twin spacecraft that will rendezvous with binary asteroids for a NASA mission in 2022.

Rocket Lab's first in-house built satellite launched into orbit Monday as part of its 14th Electron mission that took off from a launch complex in New Zealand and fielded a microsatellite for Capella Space.

Rocket Lab has updated its Electron launch vehicle that now enables it to carry up to 660 pounds of payload to low orbits and 441 pounds to sun-synchronous orbits or 310.1 miles.

United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket has entered the final preparation phase ahead of the Mars 2020 mission in which NASA’s Perseverance rover will conduct a probe of the Martian surface to support planetary research.

Maxar Technologies has renewed four contracts and expanded a fifth contract with international defense and intelligence customers, with the total of all awards valued at approximately $120 million, for uninterrupted access to its current satellite constellation, the company announced Monday. 

The International Astronomical Union has approved an official name for the Didymos asteroid system’s smaller moon that will serve as the target of an experiment by NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Maxar Technologies has been awarded a five-year, $23 million contract by the Department of the Interior to develop an analytics system to probe the behavior of vehicles in multiple domains at scale and in near-real-time for the Department of Homeland Security, the company announced Monday.