Space Shuttle Endeavour lit up the predawn sky above Florida’s Space
Coast on Monday February 7th with a launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space
Center.

Mr René Oosterlinck, ESA’s Director of the Galileo Programme and Navigation-related Activities, signed the first three contracts for the Galileo full operational capability phase. This event marks the start of building the Galileo operational infrastructure.

The team consisting of the US firm Lockheed Martin and the Italian company e-GEOS (Telespazio/ASI) has been awarded a contract worth up to USD 85 million by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to provide data, products and services from the COSMO-SkyMed satellites.

After a major 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on 12 January, causing major casualties and damage the rescue teams needed new satellite high resolution maps, because such a powerful earthquake can make current maps suddenly out of date, causing additional challenges to rescue workers on the ground.

Antonio Tajani, European Commission Vice-President in charge of Transport, has announced the award of three of the six contracts for the procurement of Galileo’s initial operational capability.

Vessel traffic security of Venice lagoon will be guaranteed by SELEX Sistemi Integrati, a Finmeccanica Group Company. Selex has been awarded a contract for the realization of the phase 1 of the Integrated Monitoring Telematic System (STIM) that will enable the vessel movements surveillance of the Venice lagoon and perform, in a security way, the protection barriers that are actually at a realization phase within the MOSE project.

Thales Alenia Space announced that it has signed a new geosynchronous (GEO) communications satellite contract with OverHorizon with offices in the USA, Sweden and Cyprus.

Houston / Moscow — NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer, Russian cosmonaut
Oleg Kotov and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut
Soichi Noguchi, launched aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to the
International Space Station on Sunday, are onboard of the ISS.

On December 24, 1979, the member states of the European Space Agency (ESA), for the first time,  launched their own rocket into space – the foundation stone of the extraordinary success story of the Ariane launcher system.

Paris –  At the Paris headquarters of the French space agency (CNES), Simonetta Di Pippo, ESA Director of Human Spaceflight, and Thierry Duquesne, CNES Director for Strategy, Programmes and International Relations, signed an agreement that paves the way for the launch of a high-accuracy atomic clock to be attached to the outside of the European Columbus laboratory onboard the International Space Station (ISS).