United Launch Alliance is shifting focus from development of the Vulcan Centaur program to a high-rate production model to meet backlogs for the U.S. Space Force and Amazon Leo.

The USSF-87 mission will deploy the seventh and eighth satellites of the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP).

United Launch Alliance is preparing the USSF-87 national security mission to lift off on February 12, 2026 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Mark Peller was appointed chief operating officer of United Launch Alliance to support interim CEO John Elbon.

United Launch Alliance’s 2026 manifest includes the final 13 Atlas V rockets, most of which are already fabricated and in storage, alongside a scaling number of Vulcan cores.

Amazon requested a 24-month extension from the Federal Communications Commission to meet deployment milestones for Amazon Leo, citing a global shortage of heavy-lift capacity.

Tory Bruno exited United Launch Alliance on December 22, 2025 after nearly 12 years as President and CEO.

The USSF-106 mission in August 2025 served as the operational debut for the Vulcan rocket.

Amazon Leo is the new name for the constellation formerly known as Project Kuiper.

Customers driving the current smallsat market are primarily major defense primes and government agencies.

EnduroSat USA recommends that customers leverage existing satellite buses rather than building constellations from scratch to avoid spending $10–20 billion.

The smallsat industry is transitioning away from early-stage TRL 0 experimentation toward reliability, scale, and sovereign capability.

The smallsat industry is shifting from a move-fast-and-break-things approach toward a focus on industrial resilience and supply-chain survivability.

Pacific countries that risk undersea cable cuts require resilient communications capabilities to maintain connectivity.

Engineering priorities for smallsat companies now emphasize manufacturing products repeatedly, reliably, and on time.

Panelists at the SmallSat Symposium prioritized sovereign communication capabilities and resilient infrastructure over speculative near-term concepts like orbital data centers.

Aerospacelab moved component manufacturing in-house to secure its supply chain.

The Golden Dome missile defense initiative requires an industrial base capable of producing assets at rates beyond boutique manufacturing.

OHB is a subcontractor on the Esprit module, one of the ESA contributions to NASA’s Gateway lunar space station.

Marco Fuchs, CEO of OHB, is a managing director of European Moonport Company.

ESA and NASA exchange agreements that include the Esprit contribution help secure flight opportunities for European astronauts to the lunar orbital outpost.

At the end of 2025, Thales Alenia Space selected OHB to supply multiple subsystems for the descent module of the ESA Argonaut lunar lander.

OHB created a new subsidiary called European Moonport Company to consolidate its efforts related to future missions to the Moon.

European Moonport Company’s short-term objective is to consolidate OHB’s existing lunar activities.

OHB indicated that Germany assumed a leadership role on lunar presence issues at the ESA Ministerial Council (CM25) held in Bremen in November 2025.

The OHB and Munich Airport lunar base project is described as a high-level concept and was represented by an initial mock-up used at a press event.

The European Space Agency plans to launch the first Argonaut lunar lander in 2031.

European Moonport Company will focus on lunar exploration and the development of infrastructure for a sustained presence on the lunar surface.

On 4 February, OHB presented a concept for a central launch and landing base on the lunar surface developed in collaboration with Munich Airport.

European Moonport Company was founded in May 2025.

OHB previously created a spaceports company in November to consolidate its terrestrial launch infrastructure projects.

Sabine von der Recke, OHB’s director of Political Affairs and Communications, is a managing director of European Moonport Company.

OHB stated that Europe needs to formulate and implement a systematic strategy for a sustainable presence on the Moon.

Automotive standards like AEC-Q100 provide high reliability against wear-out but do not require radiation testing.

The commercial space sector benefited for the past decade from a quiescent sun and Earth's protective magnetosphere in Low Earth Orbit.

Relying solely on late-stage component testing for radiation creates a scheduling bottleneck that current programs cannot accommodate.

The Radiation Team presented a technical session titled From LEO to Lunar at the SmallSat Symposium.

Demand for high-performance computing on the Moon is pushing designers to use modern process nodes such as 7nm and 5nm that are inherently more susceptible to radiation.

System-Level Hardening is a middle-ground approach proposed to bridge LEO engineering practices and deep space radiation requirements without reverting to fully rad-hard military-grade components.

Engineers mitigated the Van Allen Belts radiation-induced failure by adjusting the GNC profile to execute an engine burn five minutes earlier, reducing radiation exposure to an acceptable level.

Mega-constellation operators such as Starlink normalized the use of automotive-grade electronics through redundancy and rapid replacement.

Recent solar storms exposed significant margins of error in radiation resilience among many commercial operators.

A global shortage of heavy-ion testing facilities has created a 5,000-hour annual deficit in beam-time at premier labs such as the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory and CERN.

Lunar infrastructure including gateways, rovers, and habitats must operate for years without de-orbiting options or easy repairs.

The Radiation Team recommends shifting radiation engineering to the concept and design phase to enable system-level mitigations.

One mission experienced a critical engine controller failure due to radiation exposure in the Van Allen Belts.

Transitioning to the lunar surface exposes electronics to Galactic Cosmic Rays and Solar Particle Events that are largely deflected by Earth's magnetic field in LEO.

The System-Level Hardening methodology accepts that individual silicon gates will fail and designs architectures to tolerate those failures without ending the mission.

The economic model for LEO constellations emphasizes volume and tolerates fail-operational strategies, while lunar missions demand fail-safe reliability closer to heritage specifications.

Traditional workflows treat radiation as a final verification step where parts are tested for survival.