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.

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. 

After the first successful day, the second came to follow. You may say that some sort of routine came up and everything seemed to be a bit easier. 

Since Sigmar Gabriel officially opened the exhibition yesterday, Alexander Dobrindt came today to visit Europes largest fair for aerospace industries. Beneath that we had a very interested and way more interesting delegation at our both: the Juris. These are from a iniative from the BDLI,  which has the aim to interest young boys and girls in technics and aerospace. 

Without wanting to praise ourselves, you have to ungrudgingly acknowledge that our booth belongs to the most beautiful ones here at the ILA. After two busy construction days full of sweat and frayed nerves our booth shone today for the opening in all its glory!