On March 26th, 2017, it was time to head for Bonn - with our packed truck on its way to the former federal capital. On the same evening, our Laser Communication Terminal already took its place at the DLR booth at the Maritim Hotel.

On 16th and 17th March 2017, the G20 conference "Digitizing Manufacturing - Initiatives, Best Practices and Policy Approaches" took place in Berlin. The conference at the Berlin Congress Center at Alexanderplatz was characterized by numerous lectures and panel discussions. The organizer of the event was the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy.

Not long ago we ware able to witness the launch of the groundbreaking SmallGEO satellite Hispasat 36W-1 live and now the next milestone is at the gates: Sentinel-2B is ready for take off and will be launched tonight at around 02:49 h (CET) on board a European Vega launcher.

To all the night owls, aerospace enthusiasts and satellite lunatics: A Soyuz VS16 rocket with the OHB-built SmallGEO satellite HISPASAT 36W-1 and our telecommunication payload starts today at 02:32 pm Central European Time, or "exactly" in 14 hours and 6 minutes. Here, thanks to ESA and livestream.com, you can experience the launch up close and live.

For more than fifteen years, Tesat-Spacecom from Backnang has stood for quality and innovation in space equipment. Fifteen years full of exciting developments, innovations, great milestones and the one or other big and small revolution in space. With pride one can look back on what has been created, and with pride one can look into the future, on what is still to come to us. With the self-confidence of more than 700 realized space projects and more than 250 million in-orbit hours, we expect this future with excitement as well as with enthusiastic curiosity.

The TGO space probe was now on its way to the Red Planet for seven months, and is now on the finishing line of the ExoMars mission. Yesterday afternoon, the international team of ESA and Roskosmos researchers celebrated the first milestone: The separation of "Schiaparelli" from the research probe "TGO", which was not quite uninhibitive, was successfully mastered. Now it takes a few more days until Schiaparelli has braked to the right speed, before it lands on Mars on Wednesday.

Using an Atlas-V rocket and on board the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx amplifiers made by Tesat-Spacecom make themselves tomorrow on the way to the asteroid Bennu. After New Horizons and Juno, OSIRIS-REx is the third spacecraft of the New Frontiers Program of NASA. The aim of the OSIRIS-REx mission is to collect samples and return them to Earth. More precisely, the probe shall gather around 60 grams of regolith, "non-earthly loose material on the surface of asteroids", with its arm, store it safely and bring it back to Earth.

The optical observation satellite Sentinel-2B, which structurally identical twin-satellite Sentinel-2A has already been started on June 23, 2015, now comes into the hot phase. Yesterday the second "eye" of the European Earth monitoring program Copernicus was completed and is now ready for different space tests in the Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) of ESA in Noordwijk.

Even at the last day the weather was more than perfect and the stream of visitors seemed to be endless. Our colleagues from Backnang came by bus to visit the ILA and started their journey at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Perfect weather conditions introduced the third day at the ILA Berlin Air Show 2016, which was also the first visitor day of the exhibition. 

Today at our booth we had two young delegations, one from DeSK (German Center for Satellite Communication) and one from Thales. Also our own trainees came to visit us and took the long way from Backnang.