Contract

Straddling the border between Brazil and Paraguay, Itaipu commenced electricity production in 1984. The technological upgrades being planned for the site are set to take 14 years.Tifonimages | Istock | Getty ImagesGE Renewable Energy has signed a deal that will see it carry out upgrades to the 14 gigawatt Itaipu hydropower plant, a vast facility straddling the border between Brazil and Paraguay.In a statement earlier this week, GE Renewable Energy said its Hydro and Grid Solutions businesses had signed a contract related…

Lockheed Martin's space division has won a NASA contract to build the rocket that will return the first Mars rock samples to Earth in the 2030s, the US space agency said Monday.The "small, lightweight rocket" will be the first to take off from another planet, bringing back "rock, sediment and atmospheric samples from the surface of the Red Planet," NASA said in a statement.NASA's Perseverance Rover has been collecting samples from various Martian areas since landing on Earth's neighbor a year ago.The goal of the mission…

NASA has granted three more missions — Crew-7, Crew-8, and Crew-9 — to SpaceX as part of its Commercial Human Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract for crew transportation services to the International Space Station (ISS). This takes the space agency's total number of crewed missions to the ISS to nine, including the three successful operational trips over the last two years. The original $2.6-billion (roughly Rs. 19,700 crore) contract was awarded to SpaceX in 2014 for the development of American crewed launch…

Amazon's satellite venture, SpaceX's Starlink network and other satellite firms on Wednesday won a combined $278.5 million (roughly Rs. 2120 crore) in contracts from NASA to demonstrate communications in space as the US space agency moves to replace its current satellite network in orbit with privately-built systems.NASA is increasingly looking to rely on private space companies for its operations and wants to stimulate more commercial activity in areas from space communications to sending humans to orbit.Amazon's Project…