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This past week, we unveiled the agenda for TC Sessions: Space for the first time. It’s our inaugural phenomenon focused on space startups and related engineerings, and it’s happening December 16 and 17. It’s entirely virtual, of course, and the good news is that means you can attend readily from anywhere in the world.

We’ve got an amazing lineup, including newsmakers we regularly cover here. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine “il be there”, as well as U.S. Space Force commanding office Jay Raymond, and Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, to words only a few. Tickets are available now, so sign up ASAP to get the best price possible.

SpaceX launched 120 Starlink satellites last week alone

SpaceX launched not one, but two separate Falcon 9 projectiles loaded with Starlink planets for its broadband internet service last week. The first taken away from on October 19, then only 5 days later, another full complement contacted path. SpaceX has now launched nearly 1,000 of these, and it must be getting exceedingly close to kicking off its public beta of the consumer-facing internet service.

NASA snags rock sample from asteroid’s skin-deep

OSIRIS-REx probe 'tagging' the surface of asteroid Bennu

Image Credits: NASA

NASA has managed to collect a test from the surface of an asteroid in a first for relevant agencies. The sample accumulation came generosity of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx robotic expedition examination, which was built by partner Lockheed Martin. OSIRIS-REx still has some work to do at Bennu, the asteroid from which it mustered the sample, but next year it’ll begin leading back with its treasured cargo intended for study by scientists now on Earth.

NASA also felt water on the sunny side of the moon

NASA is full of special detections the coming week — scientists working on its SOFIA likeness project substantiated the presence of water on the surface of the moon that’s exposed to sunlight. They’d believed it was there, but this is the first established proof, and while it isn’t a whole lot of spray, it could still modification the future of human deep space exploration.

NASA discovers sea on the surface of the sunlit portion of the moon

Microsoft collaborators with SpaceX, unveils’ Azure Space ‘

Image Credits: Microsoft

Microsoft regards primed to invest in space-based business in a big way with Azure Space, a brand-new business section it formed to handle all space-related businesses attached to its vapour data exertions. That includes a new kind of deployable portable data center that will be connected in part via SpaceX’s Starlink global broadband system, putting computing power near where it’s needed in a scalable way.

Intel’s neighbourhood AI processor is now operating in space

Intel has laden up a small satellite with a power-efficient edge AI processor, its Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit. That’ll help the satellite do its own on-board classification of epitomes of Earth that it takes, saving key bandwidth for what it sends back to researchers on the dirt. Regional AI could help satellite networks in general operate much more efficiently, but it’s still in its infancy as a field.

Intel is providing the smarts for the first satellite with neighbourhood AI processing on board

Lockeed Martin hand-pickeds Relativity for NASA mission

Image Credits: Relativity Space

Relativity Space has tons of promise in areas of its 3D-printed projectiles, but it still hasn’t actually reached the launch stage. It did nonetheless stick a key government contract, with Lockheed Martin selecting its projectile for a forthcoming mission to test liquid management systems for NASA.

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