|  BREMEN, Germany — Europe's aerospace industry is getting ready for NASA's proposed Deep Space Gateway, hoping Europe will have its own module at the lunar-orbit space station resupplied by a European transport system.
During a session on the final day of Space Tech Expo Europe here, Frederic Masson, an engineer at French space agency CNES, said France is already considering ways to increase performance of the upcoming Ariane 6 launcher to make it fit to contribute to humankind's next big space endeavor. "We are preparing a demonstrator for a reusable first stage that is called Calisto," Masson said. "But we think the most efficient thing would be to add a solar electric space tug as an additional stage." Such a space tug concept, Masson said, is already being studied by Airbus Defence and Space. — Tereza Pultarova | | |  Balloons, unmanned planes and other so-called pseudo satellites loitering in the stratosphere are likely to enrich the global communications and Earth-observation ecosystem in the not-so-distant future.
Google, an especially deep-pocketed proponent of these satellite alternatives, demonstrated again this week that at least some high-altitude pseudo satellites have passed the purely research and development stage, when it dispatched its helium-filled balloons, developed as part of the Google Loon Project, to provide basic internet and text messaging services to a Puerto Rico still reeling from Hurricane Maria more than month ago. Facebook, another believer in internet through high-altitude platforms, sometimes called pseudo-satellites, successfully test-flew its Aquila drone earlier this year. However, Berlin-based start-up AlphaLink, presenting at this week's Space Tech Expo in Bremen, Germany, says that quite a few technical problems need to be solved before high-altitude platforms can fully take off. —Tereza Pultarova | | | 24-26 October, Bremen, Germany | | Registration | Exhibition Hall | Industry Forum | Tech Forum | | Thurs 26 October | 08:00 - 15:00 | 08:45 - 15:00 | 09:00 - 15:00 | 09:25 - 13:50 | | | |  The Ice Cubes initiative, a public-private partnership between the European Space Agency and Belgium-based Space Applications Services, will send a first batch of commercial experiments to the International Space Station this spring.
Billed by ESA as "the first commercial European opportunity to conduct research in space," Ice Cubes offers researchers room to conduct experiments inside Europe's Columbus module aboard the ISS.The first five experiments to be flown under Ice Cubes range from plant biology to gyroscopes to heat-transfer in fluids. Space Applications Services' business development manager, Hilde Steinut, said the company receives a lot of interest mostly from the science and research community but expects substantial growth in interest from the industry, including pharmaceutical and materials research. "The interest is quite huge," Steinut told SpaceNews on the sidelines of the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany, Oct. 26. — Tereza Pultarova | | |  Today's OHB might be Europe's third-largest space sector corporation, harvesting prestigious government contracts, but the Bremen-headquartered firm still remembers its modest beginnings.
Thirty-five years ago, OHB was a family-run business with the staff of five run from a garage workshop, building and repairing hydraulic and electric systems for the German navy. The firm's growth and expansion has been spectacular as it steadily climbed from subsystems to full-fledged satellites, including Europe's Galileo naviation satellites. It's the company's history that makes today's management fond of the emerging startup companies struggling to break into the increasingly competitive and fast evolving sector. In a sense, OHB sees itself as a godmother of European startups and wants to extend its hand to the space hopefuls of today. At the Space Tech Expo in Bremen, SpaceNews met with Fritz Merkle, a member of OHB's Executive Board, to discuss the challenges of the NewSpace era. — Tereza Pultarova | | |  Austrian startup Enpulsion claims to have found the key to bringing a notoriously difficult propulsion technology to market.
To do so, Enpulsion has raised 3.4 million euros — 1 million for European Space Agency (ESA) research and 2.4 million from private sources and the European Commission — and is establishing a U.S. division in San Francisco, Richard Sypniewski Jr., Enpulsion's senior business development engineer, told SpaceNews. Enpulsion is commercializing a Field Emission Electric Propulsion, or FEEP, thruster starting with small satellites ranging from 3 to 100 kilograms, Sypniewski said. ESA and industry have studied FEEP systems for well over a decade, but with limited success getting the technology beyond the laboratory. — Caleb Henry | | |  The aerospace industry's view of additive manufacturing has changed dramatically since Stephane Abed founded Poly-Shape in 2007. At that time, few aircraft or spacecraft manufacturers were considering additive manufacturing for metal parts. A decade later, contracts with Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defence and Space keep employees busy.
"We produce parts every day that go into spacecraft," Abed, Poly-Shape founder and chief executive, told SpaceNews at the Additive Aerospace Summit in Los Angeles last week. "They are qualified and they are launched." The aerospace market grew so quickly, in fact, that Poly-Shape and LISI Aerospace, a firm based in Paris that manufacturers structural components and fasteners, formed LISI Aerospace Additive Manufacturing in 2015 to pair LISI's relationships with aerospace primes with Poly-Shape's expertise in 3D printing and 30 metal additive manufacturing machines. — Debra Werner | | | | |
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