Contract
Small US firm SpaceDev has won a five-year, $43 million contract, its largest ever, to build six microsatellites for the US Missile Defense Agency. The contract is for a distributed sensing experiment involving up to two clusters of three low-Earth-orbit microsatellites, with one cluster to be networked by on-orbit laser communications. The programme will build on technology in SpaceDev's ChipSat internet-based microsatellite, launched in January 2003.
Source: Flight International