French spaceplane startup AndroMach announced on 15 May that it had received a CNES contract to begin testing an early prototype of its Banger v1 rocket engine.

Founded in 2023, AndroMach is developing a pair of spaceplanes that will be used to perform suborbital and orbital missions to space. The suborbital ENVOL spaceplane will utilize turbojet engines for takeoff and landing, and a pressure-fed LOX/biopropane rocket engine to reach space. Test flights of this smaller vehicle will begin in early 2027. The larger ÉTOILE “orbital shuttle” is designed to be launched by a variety of small launch vehicles and will be capable of carrying payloads of up to 100 kilograms. According to the company, initial test flights of ÉTOILE are expected to begin at the beginning of the next decade.

Work on the project’s first phase began in the second half of 2024 and focused on identifying the technology maturation needs for a reusable upper stage demonstrator. This phase also included an assessment of potential commercial applications for the technology.

On 15 May, ESA published a call for proposals for Phase 2 of the project, which will focus on activities “up to a critical design milestone.” This stage in a project’s development typically signifies that the detailed design is complete and the system is ready to proceed to manufacturing or full-scale implementation. While the call did not provide much additional detail, it does note that Phase 2 will involve early long-lead technology maturation and demonstration activities.

Kann die Erde vor einem Asteroideneinschlag geschützt werden? 🛡️🌎 Mit der Hera-Mission der @esa testet Europa, ob sich ein Asteroid gezielt ablenken lässt. Dafür hat das DLR das Gravimeter GRASS mitentwickelt, das auf dem Asteroidenmond Dimorphos landen und dort die Schwerkraft messen wird. Was bringt das? Ein besseres Verständnis über den inneren Aufbau von Dimorphos – Wissen, das hilft, die Erde vor künftigen Einschlägen zu schützen.
👉 Mehr im neuen DLR-Blogartikel: http://s.dlr.de/HERA

On 7 May, ESA announced the signing of the agreement, stating that the cooperation would focus on activities in low Earth orbit, with provisions for potential future missions to the Moon. The announcement specifically outlined plans to work together on the “interoperability of rendezvous and docking systems to allow their respective spacecraft to work together.” Other near-term areas of collaboration outlined in the agreement include astronaut training, analogue space missions on Earth, and parabolic flight training.

In addition to near-term collaborations, ESA also revealed that the agreement could pave the way for missions to India’s planned Bharatiya Antariksh Station by European astronauts.

ESA’s agreement with ISRO comes less than a week after the Trump Administration released a proposed budget that would slash funding for NASA.

In response to the White House’s proposed NASA budget cuts, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher wrote that the agency will continue to forge strong ties with space agencies from around the world. And in a subtle rebuke of the Trump Administration’s proposed cuts, Aschbacher added that ESA was committed to being a “reliable partner.”

🌾 🛰️ With help of satellite observations, #AI and process-based models, the research project #EOAgriTwin creates digital twins of agricultural landscapes for climate resilient farming – powered by @esa, ZALF & partners! 🌍

https://www.zalf.de/en/aktuelles/Pages/FPD/EOAgriTwin-Projektstart.aspx

#AgriTech #ClimateChange

#ESA just launched a new satellite called #Biomass. It allows us even better watch the continuous destruction of the biosphere.

https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing/_the/_Earth/FutureEO/Biomass

@esa

Welcome everyone!

| Scheduled for (UTC) | 2025-04-29 09:15 | |

|

| | Scheduled for (local) | 2025-04-29 06:15 (GFT) | | Launch site | ELV, Guiana Space Centre, French Guiana, France | | Launch vehicle | Vega C | | Payloads | BIOMASS | | Payload mass | 1,170.0 kg | | Target orbit | Sun-Synchronous Orbit |

Livestreams

| Stream | Link | |

|

| | Arianespace (English) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEhmFO_Y_WE | | Arianespace (Français) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0UP77VUpqE | | Arianespace (Italiana) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIvpiMRFEz4 | | ESA | https://www.youtube.com/@EuropeanSpaceAgency/streams | | Space Affairs | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u5ZEmXmBds |

Stats

☑️ 1st Vega-C mission of 2025, 5th mission overall

☑️ 1st Vega mission of 2024, 26th mission overall

☑️ 2nd Arianespace mission of 2025, 301st mission overall

Payload info

ESA BIOMASS mission page

NextSpaceflight page

ESA’s Earth Observation Programme Board has selected Biomass in May 2013 to become the seventh Earth Explorer mission. The innovative satellite aims to map and monitor one of Earth’s most precious resources.

The satellite will be designed to provide, for the first time from space, P-band radar measurements that are optimised to determine the amount of biomass and carbon stored in the world’s forests with greater accuracy than ever before.

This information, which is poorly known in the tropics, is essential to our understanding of the role of forests in Earth’s carbon cycle and in climate change.

Reliable knowledge of tropical forest biomass also underpins the implementation of the UN Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative – an international effort to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and land degradation in developing countries.

In addition, the measurements made by Biomass offer the opportunity to map the elevation of Earth’s terrain under dense vegetation, yielding information on subsurface geology and allowing the estimation of glacier and ice-sheet velocities, critical to our understanding of ice-sheet mass loss in a warming Earth.

Please feel free to post updates and questions in the comments!

🌍 TerraMind: A breakthrough in global-scale Earth observation!
Developed by JSC, IBMResearch , @esa , and @DLR this any-to-any multimodal model fuses satellite imagery, elevation data, land use maps & language. TerraMind leads the field on the PANGAEA benchmark.

Recently, we got one of our best views yet of the tiny moon when a European mission named Hera, en route to the asteroid Didymos, flew through the Martian system for a gravity assist. During this transit, the spacecraft came within just 300 km of Deimos.