Q&A with Guglielmo Aglietti, RemoveDebris principal investigator (members only)

The next pair of spacecraft to join Europe’s Galileo navigation system are positioned for liftoff late Thursday aboard a Soyuz rocket. These photos chronicle the preparation of the satellites for launch at the Guiana Space Center.

After a nine-month hiatus caused by bankruptcy, the deployment of OneWeb’s broadband network will resume Friday with the launch of the company’s next 36 satellites on a Soyuz rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East.

A $66 million NASA-funded science sensor package bolted on to a commercial communications satellite is ready for a ride toward a 22,000-mile-high orbital perch Thursday on a European Ariane 5 rocket, commencing a two-year mission surveying a rarely-studied region of Earth’s upper atmosphere.