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Spaceflight Industries to sell its satellite rideshare launch business to Japan’s Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa
Spaceflight Industries, owner of both Spaceflight, Inc. and BlackSky, is selling the Spaceflight, Inc. portion of its business to Japanese industrial megacorporation Mitsui & Co, and Yamasa both of which will co-own the company in a 50/50 joint venture after its closing. The deal will see Spaceflight continue to operate as an independent business based in the U.S. and headquartered in Seattle, with the same mission of providing rideshare launch services for small satellite payloads.
Meanwhile, Spaceflight Industries will use the funds generated from the sale (the terms of the deal were not disclosed) to re-invest in its BlackSky business. BlackSky is an Earth observation company that deals in geospatial intelligence, and that currently operates four satellites in orbit, with eight more planned to join its constellation sometime later this year.
The deal also means that Mistui & Co, which is one of Japan’s largest businesses and which operates in a variety of sectors including infrastructure, energy production, IT, food, consumer products, mining, chemicals and more, will now be in the rocket launch rideshare business as well. Mitsui also has an aerospace arm that includes a space business which provides satellite development, launch and operation services, but noted in a press release that Spaceflight will become “the cornerstone” of its space strategy pending close of the deal.
Spaceflight, Inc. has been offering its services since 2010, and has launched a total of 271 satellites on 29 separate rocket launches, with 10 missions set to take place in 2020 alone. The company’s business seems poised to grow as more launch providers and more small satellite operators enter the market, with many predictions indicating sharp uptakes in orbit-based businesses to come over the next decade.
This arrangement is perhaps indicative of things to come in the space industry, as more young companies look at their overall business and determine how best to delineate things to continue their growth and return funds on investment to stay on mission. SpaceX, for instance, has confirmed it’s looking at spinning out its Starlink business and taking that public, a move that could generate significant funds for it to then funnel back into its core launch business in pursuit of its goals of making humans multi-planetary.
The deal still has to undergo review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) because there’s a national security interest involved, given Spaceflight’s past work. This is expected to take multiple months, and the companies say they anticipate the deal will close sometime during Q2 2020 if everything is approved.
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Kepler will build its small satellites at a new manufacturing facility in Toronto
Satellite communications startup Kepler will manufacture its small satellites going forward at a new 5,000-square-foot facility in Toronto, Ontario, Canada . The company is working with partners, including the Canadian Space Agency and the University of Toronto, on the new facility, which will also incorporate design and development of its satellites in addition to manufacturing.
Already, Kepler operates two satellites currently in orbit, and has demonstrated the capabilities of its technology by delivering a high-speed internet data connection to the North Pole for the first time late last year. These spacecraft were designed by Kepler, but manufactured via third-parties through contracting agreements. With the new facility, Kepler says it’ll be able to “vertically integrate the development, production and testing of its future spacecraft.”
This will help the startup achieve its goal of producing, launching and operating a constellation of 140 satellites in total, which will provide high-bandwidth connectivity aimed for use in a range of industries, including agriculture, transportation and maritime shipping and logistics, to name a few. This new in-house facility will support mass production of the small satellites it requires to build out its fleet, while providing cost benefits versus outsourcing over time.
The small satellite industry is one of the parts of commercial space that has seen the biggest increase in demand, especially since relatively affordable launch vehicles like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 have expanded the pool of potential companies building and operating satellites and constellations. Bringing satellite manufacturing in-house puts Kepler in rare company as one of the few small sat companies that owns the whole stack, which should be a big competitive advantage relative to the market going forward.
In terms of when the facility will be putting out satellites that Kepler plans to actually launch, the company currently plans to launch its final demonstration satellite, which is already built under its prior contractor arrangement, this spring. Then, it intends to launch the first commercial satellites produced by this new facility starting this summer, with an additional two launches planned for later in the year.
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NASA taps startup Axiom Space for the first habitable commercial module for the Space Station
NASA has selected Houston-based Axiom Space, a startup founded in 2016, to build the first commercial habitat module for the International Space Station (ISS). This module will be used as a destination for future commercial spaceflight missions, potentially housing experiments, technology development and more performed by commercial space travelers taking rides up to the ISS via human-rated spacecraft like the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner, once those start regular operational service.
Axiom Space was founded in 2016, and is led by co-founder and CEO Michael T. Suffredini, who previously acted as program manager for the ISS at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The company boasts a lot of ex-NASA talent on its small team, and eventually it plans to make its in-space modules the basis of its own private space station, after first attaching them to the ISS while it’s still operating. NASA has extended the planned service life of the ISS, but the plan of the agency’s current leadership is to eventually encourage private orbital labs and commercial facilities as an ultimate replacement.
In 2018, Axiom teamed up with designer Philippe Starck (yes, the same one who famously designed a luxury yacht for Apple founder Steve Jobs) to provide a look at what their future space station modules might look like, including crew quarters with interactive displays and a cupola that provides a breathtaking view of Earth and surrounding space.
This ISS module may not be a full-fledged private space station, but it is a step in NASA’s goal of further commercializing the existing space station and ultimately paving the way for more commercial activity in low Earth orbit. Axiom’s mandate also includes providing “at least one habitable commercial module,” with the implication being that it might be awarded extensions to build more in the future. Next up for the new partners is negotiating terms and price for a contract for the module, which will also include a timeline for delivery.
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The four corners of the new space economy
It’s gotten to the point now where a handful of angel investors can put a space company on the map. But the same changes that have made the industry accessible have made it increasingly complex to track its trends. By default, all space startups are exciting, but companies vary widely in risk, capital intensity and maturity. Here’s what you need to know about the four main areas of the new space economy.
Launch: playground of billionaires and forward thinkers
Perhaps simply the most exciting industry to be a part of today, orbital launch service has gone from a government-funded niche dominated by a handful of primes to a vibrant, growing community serving insatiable demand.
There’s a good reason why it was dominated for so long by the likes of ULA, whose Delta rockets took up a huge majority of missions for decades. The barrier to entry for launch is huge.
As such there are three ways to enter the sector: brute force, stealth, and novelty.
Brute force is how SpaceX and Blue Origin have managed to accomplish what they have. With billions in investment from people who don’t actually care whether money is made in the short term (or with Bezos, even in the long term), they can perform the research and engineering necessary to make a full-scale launch platform. Few of these can ever really exist, and participation is limited when they do. Fortunately we all reap the benefits when billionaires compete for space superiority.
Stealth, perhaps better described as smart positioning, is where you’ll find Rocket Lab. This New Zealand-based company didn’t appear out of nowhere — look at its timeline and you’ll see scaled-down tests being conducted more than a decade ago. But what founder Peter Beck and his crew did was anticipate the market and work doggedly towards a specific solution.
Rocket Lab is focused on small payloads, delivered with short turnaround time. This avoids the trouble of competing against billionaires and decades-old space dynasties because, really, this market didn’t exist until very recently.
“Responsive space, or launch on demand, is going to be increasingly important,” Beck said. “All satellites are vulnerable, be it from natural, accidental, or deliberate actions. As we see the growth and aging of small sat constellations, the need for replenishment will increase, leading to demand for single spacecraft to unique orbits. The ability to deploy new satellites to precise orbits in a matter of hours, not months or years, is critical to government and commercial satellite operators alike.”
Rocket Lab’s tenth launch, nicknamed “Running Out of Fingers.”
Investing in Rocket Lab early on would have seemed unexciting as for year after year they made measured progress but took on no cargo and made no money. Patience is the primary virtue here. But investors with foresight are looking back now on the company’s many successful launches and bright future and marveling that they ever doubted it.
The third category of launch is novelty: entirely new launch techniques like SpinLaunch or Leo Aerospace. The term may not inspire confidence, and that’s deliberate. Companies taking this approach are high-risk, high-reward propositions that often need serious funding before they can even prove the basic physical possibility of their launch technique. That’s not an investment everyone is comfortable making.
On the other hand, these are companies that, should they prove viable, may upend and collect a significant portion of the new and growing launch market. Here patience is not so much required as extra diligence and outside expertise to help separate the wheat from the chaff. Something like SpinLaunch may sound outlandish at first, but the Saturn V rocket still seems outlandish now, decades after it was built. Leaving the confines of established methods is how we move forward — but investors should be careful they don’t end up just blasting their cash into orbit.
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Orbion partners with US Department of Defense on small satellite propulsion tech
Michigan-based in-space propulsion startup Orbion is working with a major new partner: The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Orbion has secured a research contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate, specifically aimed at helping the DOD “enhance resiliency of U.S. systems in space.”
Basically, it sounds like that will boil down to seeing how Orbion’s propulsion technology can be applied to DOD satellites when used in larger constellation form, to provide those satellites with the ability to move propulsively while in orbit, and to do so in a way that can scale cost-effectively. In a press release announcing the news, Orbion CEO Brad King says that volume is a strategy when it comes to fortifying U.S. systems in space against potential foreign attack.
“One way to increase the resilience of space systems is to improve our nation’s ability to build and deploy small satellites in large numbers at low costs,” said King in a statement, “Orbion is developing mass-production techniques to build propulsion systems for commercial customers. With this research contract we are investigating how or if our manufacturing processes must be modified to meet DOD requirements.”
It’s true that in the past, the U.S. and other international powers with access to space have mostly focused on large, expensive, singular pieces of orbital hardware as their strategic assets. Shifting to the small satellite constellation approach currently being pursued by a number of private companies definitely has advantages in terms of redundancy and replaceability.
Orbion’s entire business proposition as a startup is that it’s applying mass-production to in-space thrusters, which will bring down costs and make their technology accessible to a much wider range of potential clients, and practical for application in small satellite design. The DOD may not have the same budget-constraint issues as a cash-strapped satellite startup, but long-term cost savings that also comes with a tactical advantage is a hard bargain to pass up.
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Small satellite startup Kepler opens sign-ups for its IoT developer kits
Kepler Communications, the Toronto-based startup that’s focused on developing and deploying shoebox-sized satellites to provide telecommunications services, is opening up registration for those interested in getting their first developer kits. These developer kits, designed to help potential commercial customers take advantage of its Internet of Things (IoT) narrowband connectivity deploying next year, will then be made available to purchase for elect partners next year.
This kind of early access is designed to give a head start on testing and integration to companies interested in using the kind of connectivity Kepler intends on providing. Kepler‘s service is designed to provide global coverage using a single network for IoT operators, at low costs relative to the market, for applications including tracking shipping containers, railway networks, livestock and crops and much more. Kepler says that its IoT network, which will be made up of nanosatellites designed specifically for this purpose it plans to launch throughout next year and beyond, is aimed at industries where you don’t need high bandwidth, as you would for say HD consumer video streaming, but where coverage across large, often remote areas on a consistent basis is key.
IoT connectivity provided by constellations of orbital satellites is an increasing area of focus and investment, as large industries look to modernize their monitoring and tracking operations. Startup Swarm recently got permission from the FCC to launch its 150-small satellite constellation, for instance, to establish a service to address similar needs.
Kepler, founded in 2015, has raised more than $20 million in funding, and has launched two small satellites thus far, including one in January and one in November of 2018. The company announced a contract with ISK and GK Launch Services to deploy two more sometime in the middle of next year aboard a Soyuz rocket.
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Orbit Fab raises $3M to make orbital refueling easier, cheaper and more accessible
Orbit Fab, one of the companies competing in this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco this week, has closed a seed round of $3 million. The funding comes from Type 1 Ventures, TechStars and others, and will help Orbit Fab continue to build on the great momentum it has already bootstrapped with its space-based robotic refueling technology.
You might remember the name Orbit Fab from a milestone accomplishment the young company achieved earlier this year: Becoming the first startup to supply water to the International Space Station, itself an achievement but also a key demonstration of the viability of its technology for use in orbital satellite refueling. Refueling satellites could have tremendous impact on the commercial satellite business, extending the operating life of expensive satellites considerably, which translates to better margins and more profitable businesses.
Thanks to co-founders Daniel Faber and Jeremy Schiel’s connections in the space industry, from more than 15 years working in space technology businesses in a leadership capacity, the company was able to demonstrate its technology working in space less than a year after Orbit Fab was actually founded. Faber, Orbit Fab’s CEO, and Schiel, the startup’s CMO, met when both were working at Deep Space Industries – Faber as CEO and Schiel as a contractor.
Orbit Fab’s first space payload, the ISS water resupply robot.
“We ended up reconnecting later on and really looking at a few different business models on how to push the industry forward,” Schiel said in an interview. “The one that really landed with customers, and the one that resonated with the industry was refueling satellites. Elon [Musk] has been making rockets reusable – we thought it’s time that we make satellites reusable as well.”
Starting from this realization, the pair founded the company in January 2018. They then secured their first round of pre-seed investment from Bolt in San Francisco in June that year, and also landed two contracts – including one with NASA, and one with the International Space Station National Laboratory.
“Basically in four-and-a-half months, we got flight-qualified and human-rated from NASA our two tanker test beds that we flew to the International Space Station in December 2018, and March of 2019,” Shield said.
How did they do it with that speed? Faber credits their rapid progress largely to lead engineer James Bultitude, an accomplished space engineer with five payloads on the International Space Station already.
“He took [the project] from a napkin through to flight hardware in four-and-a-half months,” Faber said. “All qualified to NASA human-rated safety standards, which was quite the feat. We really had to push hard on NASA.”
Faber said that the company’s ability to spur the U.S. space agency into action has been a key driver of its success. In fact, he relayed a story in which their National Lab demonstration payload was actually left off of its intended flight, but the team was able to get its cargo approved by top NASA decision-makers over the course of a weekend and just barely made the cut as a result.
As for working with NASA as a startup, Faber said that it’s become a very different affair, with the agency eager and adapting to working more with younger companies and startups bringing a different pace of innovation to the field.
“The change is almost palpable on the phone with NASA – you can almost hear them changing,” he said.
At Disrupt, Orbit Fab demonstrated their robotic connector for refueling on stage for the first time. The idea is that satellite makers will build their standard nozzles into their designs, and then a robotic refueler will be able to seek out the nozzle, open and then close on to the coupler, forming a solid connection to allow propellant transfer.
Already, Orbit Fab is talking to partners, including Northrop Grumman, and it’s a member of the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS), an industry group that aims to make robotic service and maintenance of satellites a viable reality.
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Why Maxar CTO Walter Scott thinks now is the time to address the orbital traffic boom
The number of objects in orbit around Earth has been growing, and growing fast. Before 1957, of course, there were a total of zero human-made objects in the orbital region of outer space just beyond Earth’s atmosphere. There were 4,987 satellites orbiting the globe at the start of this year, according to the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs, which is up nearly three percent from the year before. 2017 was a record year for orbital object launches, but with ambitious new satellite constellations planned by SpaceX and others, that’s a record that’s likely to be beat in relatively short order.
Nor are all of those satellites equipped with modern technology: All told, 8,378 objects have been launched to orbit according to the UNOOSA records, and a sizeable percentage of those spacecraft are more than a few years old.
In fact, earlier this month, Bigelow Airspace was informed by the U.S. Air Force that there’s a 5.6 percent chance that one of its satellites could collide with a Russian ‘zombie’ satellite no longer in operation, and one of Starlink’s satellites had a near-miss with one operated by the European Space Agency.
A new industry organization called the Space Safety Coalition has just issued guidelines outlining best practices for companies operating spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, with signees including Immarsat, Iridium, Planet, Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and more.
I spoke with Walter Scott, the Chief Technical Officer of publically-traded space tech company Maxar Technologies, about the new initiative, in which longtime space operator Maxar is a founding member, and why now is the right time for the satellite industry to self-regulate when it comes to sharing low-Earth orbital space.
“The best time to solve a problem is before it’s a crisis, even though that doesn’t seem to be normal human behavior,” he told me.
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Satellite internet startup Astranis books first commercial launch on SpaceX Falcon 9
Y Combinator-backed startup Astranis is now set to launch its first commercial telecommunication satellite aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, with a launch time frame currently set for sometime starting in the fourth quarter of next year. Astranis aims to address the market of people who don’t currently have broadband internet access, which is still a huge number globally, and they hope to do so using low-cost satellites that massively undercut the price of existing global telecommunications hardware, which can be built and launched much faster than existing spacecraft, too.
Astranis satellites are much more cost-efficient because they’re smaller and easier to make, which changes the economics of deployment for potential carrier and connectivity provider partners. Its approach has already attracted the partnership of Microcom subsidiary Pacific Dataport, an Anchorage company that was formed to expand satellite broadband access in Alaska. This will be the goal of the company’s first launch with SpaceX, to deliver a single satellite to geostationary orbit that will add more than 7.5 Gbps of capacity to the internet provider’s network in Alaska, tripling capacity and potentially reducing costs by “up to three times,” according to Astranis.
This isn’t the first-ever satellite that Astranis has sent up to space — it launched a demonstration satellite in 2018 to show that its tech could work as advertised. Astranis’ approach is distinct from others attempting to offer satellite-based connectivity, including SpaceX’s own Starlink project, because it focuses on building satellites that remain in a fixed orbital position relative to the area on the ground where they’re providing service, as opposed to using a large constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that offer coverage because one or more are bound to be over the coverage area at any given time as they orbit the Earth, handing off connections from one to the next.
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Rocket Lab successfully launches seventh Electron rocket for ‘Make It Rain’ mission
Private rocket launch startup Rocket Lab has succeeded in launching its ‘Make It Rain’ mission, which took off yesterday from the company’s private Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. On board Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket (its seventh to launch so far) were multiple satellites flow for various clients in a rideshare arrangement brokered by Rocket Lab client Spaceflight.
Payloads for the launch included a satellite for Spaceflight subsidiary BlackSky, which will join its existing orbital imaging constellation. There was also a CubeSat operated by the Melbourne Space Program, and two Prometheus satellites launched for the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Rocket Lab had to delay launch a couple of times earlier in the week owing to suboptimal launch conditions, but yesterday’s mission went off without a hitch at 12:30 AM EDT/4:30 PM NZST. After successfully lifting off and achieving orbit, Rocket Lab’s Electron also delayed all of its payloads to their target orbits as planned.
Later this year, Rocket Lab hopes to have a second privately owned launch complex fully constructed and operational, located in Virginia on Wallops Island. The company, founded by engineer Peter Beck, intends to be able to serve both U.S. government and commercial missions as frequently as monthly from this second launch site.
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