Bejing – China launched last week a remote-sensing satellite, “Yaogan VII,” from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern Gansu Province.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – NASA’s Wide-field Infrared
Survey Explorer, or WISE, lifted off over the Pacific Ocean this
morning on its way to map the entire sky in infrared frequency.

Government representatives from around the world gathered at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, 7–18 December, to negotiate a deal to restrict emissions of heat-trapping gases that drive climate change.
Also ESA is attending the conference – also known as COP15 as it will be the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – to present how satellites are playing an important role in observing the many aspects of our ever-changing planet.

Virgin Founder, Sir Richard Branson and SpaceshipOne (SS1) designer, Burt Rutan, revealed last monday SpaceShipTwo, SS2, to the public for the first time since construction of the world’s first manned commercial spaceship began in 2007. SS2 has been designed to take many thousands of private astronauts into space after test programming and all required U.S. government licensing has been completed.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew
of seven astronauts ended an 11-day journey of nearly 4.5
million miles with a landing Friday at NASA’s Kennedy Space
Centre in Florida.

The W7 satellite of Eutelsat Communications has been successfully lofted into orbit by a Proton Breeze M rocket supplied by ILS.

Cannes, France – Thales Alenia Space has delivered the second flight model high-resolution (HR) optical imaging instrument for integration, testing and validation in the Pleiades earth observation satellite in construction at Astrium facilities in Toulouse.

Twelve years of design, development and hard work have come to fruition with the formal handover of Node 3 from ESA to NASA on 20 November 2009. The ceremony took place in the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA.

Kourou -French Guiana – The site of a ground station for Galileo, Europe’s global navigation satellite system, inside the Guiana Space Centre (CSG), near Kourou in French Guiana, was inaugurated on 19 November.

At 11:51 a.m. EST on November 18th, Commander Charlie Hobaugh backed space shuttle Atlantis into pressurized mating adapter #2 on the International Space Station’s Harmony node. The two spacecraft were flying 220 miles above Earth between Australia and Tasmania at the time they docked.