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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.

In the context of the KinderUni Plus 2016 of the Vereins für Kinder in Backnang e.V. more than 70 inquisitive pupils flowed to Tesat-Spacecom, in order to learn or even to try out the one or the other.

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.

On 28 and 29 July, we had again a little enthusiastic crowd of young pioneers in our house who could hardly have been more curious and craft tempered. We're talking of course of our annual summer vacation program that we organize for years at Tesat-Spacecom and bring children and young people playfully closer to what we do and space technology in general.

On his tour through the "Ländle" (how we call our swabian homeland) Mr Christian Lange (Parliamentary Secretary to the Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection and member of the Bundestag) made a stopover at ours and brought Mr Franke (City Council member of the municipal council Backnang) with him.

In recent months, experts have composed from academia and industry to draw up a White Paper on the future of satellite communications. A white paper is a summary of the existing technology and gives an overview of how this will evolve in the coming years. To take account of the latest research results the writing team consists of leading professors from German universities. As a representative of business and industry Dr. Siegbert Martin, Head of Passive Microwave Products, was part of this writing team, by which Tesat has direct access to the latest research and a good understanding of future technical and technological trends and evolutions.

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.