The European Commission and ESA signed contracts with an industrial consortium Dec. 16 to develop a secure connectivity constellation with a total cost of 10.6 billion euros ($11.1 billion).

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...