OneSpace conducted a second suborbital mission in September 2018 with the 9-meter-tall, 0.85-meter-diameter OS-X1 solid rocket at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.

Chinarocket Co., Ltd. under CASC is developing the Smart Dragon-1 (Jie Long-1) solid micro launcher with a 150-kilogram capacity to a 700-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit and could have a test flight in the coming months.

The CBO characterizes its $77,000,000,000 estimate for future NC3 costs as probably conservative because much remains unknown about Pentagon plans to acquire new satellites and airborne command centers.

The CBO attributes a $19,000,000,000 increase in NC3 costs to the need to replace the Pentagon’s aging fleet of four airborne command centers and to acquire new early warning and communications satellites.

The CBO estimates the Department of Defense will need to budget $77,000,000,000 from 2019 to 2028 to maintain and modernize nuclear command, control, communications, and early warning systems (NC3).

The Congressional Budget Office projects the United States will need to spend $494,000,000,000 over the 2019–2028 period to maintain and update its nuclear forces.

The CBO’s $494,000,000,000 estimate is $94,000,000,000 higher than its forecast two years earlier.

The total CBO estimate of $494,000,000,000 over 2019–2028 is 23 percent higher than CBO’s 2017 estimate of $400,000,000,000 over 2017–2026.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review states that many NC3 systems use technology that has not been modernized in almost three decades.

The E-4B fleet includes four militarized, nuclear-hardened Boeing 747 command-and-control airplanes operated by Air Force Global Strike Command.

The CBO breaks down the $77,000,000,000 NC3 cost into command and control ($19,000,000,000), communications ($23,000,000,000), and early warning ($34,000,000,000).

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review raised concerns about the age and security of the NC3 system.

The CBO’s $77,000,000,000 NC3 estimate is about $19,000,000,000 higher than the 2017 estimate.

Swarm Technologies completed required regulatory processes for three additional satellites that launched in December aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission fined Swarm Technologies $900,000 for launching four satellites on an Indian rocket in January without authorization.

Swarm Technologies raised $25,000,000 to continue building and deploying a constellation of 150 very small satellites.

Swarm Technologies has raised more than $28,000,000 in total since forming in 2017.

The funding agreement for the 96,000,000 EUR was announced during the Conference on European Space Policy in Brussels, Belgium.

The additional 96,000,000 EUR will fund new tasks ESA is taking on, including development of the Sentinel-6 mission and the European Copernicus Data Access and Information Services.

The European Space Agency operates seven Sentinel satellites in orbit delivering terabytes of data every day, making Copernicus the largest provider of Earth observation data in the world.

The European Commission proposed a 16-billion-euro budget for space capabilities in 2018 for the 2021–2027 period.

The new amendment brings the total budget for the Copernicus space component for the 2014–2021 timeframe to 3,240,000,000 EUR.

The European Commission allocated 96,000,000 EUR ($109,000,000) for the European Space Agency to spend on the Copernicus program over the next two years.

Under a pilot partnership with the European Space Agency, the European Commission could buy a launcher each year and award its capacity to highly innovative projects to accelerate innovation in Europe.

Maroš Šefčovič estimated that 60 to 70 percent of people he meets at U.S. startups are Europeans who were educated, trained, or started their businesses in Europe and now work in the United States.

The European Commission’s European Low Cost Space Launch competition will award 10,000,000 EUR to a small launcher company in 2021.

Arianespace is launching the roughly 150-kilogram OneWeb satellites directly to a 1,200-kilometer operating orbit.

Viacom will buy Pluto TV for $340,000,000 in cash.

The six OneWeb satellites shipped to French Guiana are scheduled to launch on 2019-02-19 on an Arianespace-operated Soyuz rocket.

OneWeb reduced its originally planned first launch from 10 satellites to six satellites in order to keep four satellites as spares.

Pluto TV has roughly 12 million monthly active users, with 7.5 million using connected TVs.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard launched on its tenth test flight designated NS-10 on 2019-01-23.

Blue Origin shipped a propulsion module rated for human spaceflight to its West Texas test site in late 2018.

The NS-10 mission lifted off from Blue Origin’s test site in West Texas at 10:05 a.m. Eastern.

Blue Origin intends to use future New Shepard capsules to carry people and expects the next capsule delivered from its factory in Washington state to carry people.

The New Shepard capsule on NS-10 reached a peak altitude of 107 km.

The Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, developed in the 1990s to counter North Korean and Iranian ballistic missiles, cost $70,000,000,000 and has demonstrated a 50 percent success rate.

Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund argued that the MDR's call for further study of space-based interceptors indicates the Pentagon is not convinced the technology can work or that deploying such weapons is smart policy.

The 2019 Missile Defense Review recommended deploying a new Space Sensor Layer for hypersonic missile defense.

The House passed an omnibus appropriations bill on 2019-01-23, by a 234–180 vote that would fund most agencies affected by the shutdown, other than the Department of Homeland Security, for the remainder of fiscal 2019 and would provide $21,500,000,000 to NASA.

The FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation was not issuing new licenses or modifying existing licenses during the shutdown but was supporting commercial launches under existing licenses.

Exos Aerospace delayed the launch of its SARGE reusable sounding rocket from 2019-02-09, to 2019-03-02.

Exos Aerospace had previously postponed a planned 2019-01-05 launch because the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation was unable to modify their license to change wind-related safety calculations.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory operations continued because the Smithsonian Institution agreed to advance funding to the Chandra X-Ray Center to continue science and mission operations through mid-March 2019 as necessary.

DARPA extended the DARPA Launch Challenge requirement for prospective teams to have FAA launch license applications formally accepted from 2019-02-01, to 2019-02-15, because of the shutdown.

Vector prepared to ship a Vector-R rocket to Pacific Spaceport Complex–Alaska in February 2019 for stage testing ahead of a planned launch.

NASA postponed its Day of Remembrance that had been scheduled for 2019-01-31, because most NASA employees were on furlough.

The Senate scheduled votes on two spending bills for 2019-01-24, including one bill that would fund agencies through 2019-02-08.

Some individuals affiliated with NASA participated in a protest in the Hart Senate Office Building on 2019-01-23, calling on the Senate to pass appropriations bills to end the shutdown.

Rocket Lab required a new FAA launch license for a late-February 2019 Electron launch because the mission would fly an entirely new trajectory and required a new safety analysis.