April 2020
Reviving Russia’s space programme
‘Troubled’, ‘once-great’, ‘flagging’, ‘accident-prone’, ‘unreliable’ - these are adjectives often found in western accounts of the present-day Russian space programme. Occasional set-backs quickly attract headlines of ‘another Russian failure’, but ...
April 2020
Protecting against the dangers of space radiation
The world is at an ambitious juncture in the history of human space exploration. International space agencies and a number of private companies are aligned to go back to the Moon and then onwards to Mars. But there are still considerable challenges ...
May 2020
Iran - emerging space state or threat to world peace?
Iran recently celebrated 40 years of revolution and 10 years of spaceflight. In 2019, the Islamic Republic of Iran commemorated the 40th anniversary of the revolution that transformed the state into a theocracy - with a parliament but with the ...
October 2020
Open Source Space
The spin-out of technologies from space into terrestrial applications over the past 50 years has made a direct impact on the lives of people on Earth. A key challenge for the coming decades is to continue to improve the affordability and ...
June 2021
China’s ascending commercial space sector
The 2020s have already proved to be an unprecedented decade in many ways. The first 16 months brought a global pandemic, economic changes, progressive digitisation and, oddly enough, increased interest in the space sector. The western space sector ...
July 2021
A shared vision for space exploration
The last Apollo mission to the Moon was almost 50 years ago and in that time no human has set foot on any celestial body outside of Earth. In those intervening decades, we have made advances in space science, engineering and commerce but, when it ...
