Commercial

Daimler Trucks is establishing a global organization for electric mobility called the E-Mobility Group. To kick that off, the company announced that its division in the US, Freightliner, will be adding two new electric commercial trucks to its offerings: the Freightliner eCascadia and the eM2 106.

Electric vehicles are becoming practical for more driving tasks, but electric tech has a ways to go before all-electric motorhome touring is common. One of the more famous purveyors of big motorhomes, Winnebago is taking a step in that direction with an all-electric Class A platform.

Space tourism has been long touted as 'coming soon', but the only opportunity to buy your way into space were rare private trips to the International Space Station with price tags of US$20 million. Now Orion Span has revealed Aurora Station space hotel, promising an ambitious 2022 opening date.

Virgin Galactic's tourist-carrying spaceplane has taken a step closer to entering service after its chemical rocket engine was fired for the first time. VSS Unity reached Mach 1.87 (1,424 mph, 2,290 km/h) within 30 seconds of igniting its engine.

Cell coverage on Earth may not be as comprehensive as it could be, but that isn't stopping Vodafone and Nokia from setting up the Moon's first 4G network. The data-streaming network will provide communications support for an unmanned lander/rover mission by PTScientists scheduled to launch in 2019.

Commercial spaceflight means the infrastructure to support such endeavors. Case in point is a co-operative project between Britain and the European Space Agency to establish the world's first commercial deep-space tracking and communications station in Goonhilly, Cornwall.

Not many of us think about commercial vans. Yet all of us have ridden in one or may even eventually have cause to own one. These are the workhorses of the delivery world. The Metris is Mercedes' current offering and the Passenger variant is made specifically for shuttling people.

Commercial passenger spaceflight has gone on the books with Boeing announcing that it's received the first contract ever issued to a private company to carry out a manned space mission.

Incidents, including last year's Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo crash, have led some politicians in New Mexico to question the future of Spaceport America, where Virgin is an anchor tenant, and to even call for the US$200 million facility to be put up for sale.

The return of manned launch capabilities to US soil heralds the start of an exciting time in the space industry. But what were the driving factors behind the change, and how do the planned replacements match up? Read on as we delve deeper into NASA's mission to end the reliance on Russia by 2017.

In an attempt to pave the way for commercial, philanthropic, and civil use of small UAVs in the US and around the world, a number of players in the field have teamed up to form the Small UAV Coalition.

The US FAA has today granted exemptions to six Hollywood studios to use drones in film production. The move marks significant progress in a collective push from commercial entities to tap into the potential of UAVs, something that the FAA as so far determined a no-go zone.