12 February 2018
Former NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson said on 12 February the U.S. should welcome foreign partnerships to help aide its space program, saying the government will face challenges if it pursues a plan to privatise the International Space Station. “Well I think we need everyone. If I were the king, I would try to negotiate and figure out a way to bring China and India in with us as well. If you work with people in space, you don’t fight with them on the ground,” he said.
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14 February 2018
The year 2018 will be an ambitious year for China's space program, with the largest number of Long March rocket launches.
According to Cen Zheng, rocket system commander-in-chief of the Long March-3A mission, 2018 will see 35 launches of the Long March rocket series, with 14 missions carried out by Long March-3A rockets and six by Long March-3C rockets. "Eight of the 14 Long March-3A rockets to be sent into space in 2018 will carry twin BeiDou-3 satellites," Cen said, enabling BeiDou system to provide navigation and positioning services to countries along the Belt and Road. He added: "The Long March-3A rocket family will fulfil 40 tasks from 2018 to 2020. We have a tight schedule." Although no Long March-7 rockets will be launched in 2018, developers are tasked with improving the rockets' reliability. Launches of Long March-5 have been scheduled for the latter half of this year in preparation for China's lunar probe and Mars probe missions.
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14 February 2018
To ensure the stability of the services, China continues to build and improve the domestically developed Beidou Navigation Satellite System. "We were under great pressure when the research and development program for Beidou's third-generation satellites began in 2009 because all the components of the new-generation model were new to us," Chi Jun, a senior project manager for the China Academy of Space Technology at China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. recalled. "We had to develop them on our own and overcome a range of technical difficulties." There were huge differences between the technologies used on the new model and those employed in previous generations, resulting in scientists and engineers spending a lot of time producing and verifying countless solutions, he said.
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18 February 2018
The UAE Space Agency and the International Astronomical Centre, IAC, have announced a joint campaign to monitor China's Tiangong 1 Space Laboratory as it falls back to Earth. The project was launched as a joint venture between the UAE Space Agency and the IAC, which consists of three different stations distributed throughout the UAE to record astronomical phenomena in the sky. Each station has astronomical cameras directed towards the sky that automatically start recording once a meteor is detected, which may be part of a shower or a piece of space debris. Once the meteor is detected by more than one station, its path is calculated so that its source can be determined.
A prediction, performed by The Aerospace Corporation on 14 February reports that Tiangong 1 is currently expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere around early April of 2018 ± 1.5 weeks.
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