SpaceX
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket will go reusable, with the company aiming for mid-air helicopter recovery
Private rocket launch startup and SpaceX competitor Rocket Lab made a big announcement today: It’ll be looking to re-use the first stage of its Electron rockets, returning them to Earth with a controlled landing after they make their initial trip to orbit with the payload on board. The landing sequence will be different from SpaceX’s however: They’ll attempt to catch the returned first stage mid-air using a helicopter.
That’s in part because, as Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck told a crowd when announcing the news today, the company is “not doing a propulsive re-entry” and “we’re not doing a propulsive landing,” and instead will leach off its immense speed upon return to Earth through a turnaround burn in space before releasing a parachute to slow it down enough for a helicopter to catch it.
There are a number of steps required to get to that point, but already, Rocket Lab has been looking to measure all the data it needs to ensure this is possible through its last few launches. It’s upgrading the instrumentation for its eighth flight to gather yet more data, and then on flight 10 it’ll have the rocket splash down into the ocean to recover that rocket for even more learning. Then, during a flight to be determined later (Beck is unwilling to put a number on it at this stage) they’ll try to actually bring one down in good enough shape to reuse it.
As for why, there’s a clear advantage to being able to re-fly rockets, and it’s a simple one to understand when you realize that there’s a huge amount of demand for commercial launches.
“The fundamental reason we’re doing this is launch frequency,” Beck said. “Even if I can get the stage done once, I can effectively double production ratio.”
Beck also added that the biggest difficulty will be braking the rocket’s speed as it returns to Earth — a feat next to which he said the actual mid-air capture of the Electron via helicopter is actually pretty easy, from his POV as an amateur helicopter pilot in training.
Rocket Lab has an HQ in Huntington Beach, Calif. and its own private launch site in New Zealand; it was founded in 2006 by Beck. The company has been test launching its orbital Electron rocket since 2017, and serving customers commercially since 2018. It also intends to launch from Virginia in the U.S. starting in 2019.
The company revealed its Photon satellite platform earlier this year, which would allow small satellite operators to focus on their specific service and use the off-the-shelf Photon design to skip the step of actually designing and building the satellite itself.
Powered by WPeMatico
NASA taps SpaceX, Blue Origin and 11 more companies for Moon and Mars space tech
NASA has selected 13 companies to partner with on 19 new specific technology projects it’s undertaking to help reach the Moon and Mars. These include SpaceX, Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, among others, with projects ranging from improving spacecraft operation in high temperatures to landing rockets vertically on the Moon.
Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin will work with NASA on developing a navigation system for “safe and precise landing at a range of locations on the Moon” in one undertaking, and also on readying a fuel cell-based power system for its Blue Moon lander, revealed earlier this year. The final design spec will provide a power source that can last through the lunar night, or up to two weeks without sunlight in some locations. It’ll also be working on further developing engine nozzles for rockets with liquid propellant that would be well-suited for lunar lander vehicles.
SpaceX will be working on technology that will help move rocket propellant around safely from vehicle to vehicle in orbit, a necessary step to building out its Starship reusable rocket and spacecraft system. The Elon Musk-led private space company will also be working with Kennedy Space Center on refining its vertical landing capabilities to adapt it to work with large rockets on the Moon, where lunar regolith (aka Moon dust) and the low-gravity, zero atmosphere environment can complicate the effects of controlled descents.
Lockheed Martin will be working on using solid-state processing to create metal powder-based materials that can help spacecraft deal better with operating in high-temperature environments, and on autonomous methods for growing and harvesting plants in space, which could be crucial in the case of future long-term colonization efforts.
Other projects will tap Advanced Space, Vulcan Wireless, Aerogel Technologies, Spirit AeroSystem, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Anasphere, Bally Ribbon Mills, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Colorado Power Electronics and Maxar; you can read about each in detail here.
NASA’s goals with these private partnerships are to both develop at speed, and decrease the cost of efforts to operate crewed space exploration, as part of its Artemis program and beyond.
Powered by WPeMatico
Is space truly within reach for startups and VC?
Elon Musk’s SpaceX managed to pull off something very few people thought it could — by disrupting one of the most fixed markets in the world with some of the most entrenched and protected players ever to benefit from government contract arrangements: rocket launches. The success of SpaceX, and promising progress from other new launch providers, including Blue Origin and Rocket Lab, have encouraged interest in space-based innovation among entrepreneurs and investors alike. But is this a true boom, or just a blip?
There’s an argument for both at once, with one type of space startup rapidly descending to Earth in terms of commercialization timelines and potential upside, and the other remaining a difficult bet to make unless you’re comfortable with long timelines before any liquidity event and a lot of upfront investment.
Cheaper, faster, lighter, better
Image via Getty Images / Andrey Suslov
There’s no question that one broad category of technology at least is a lot more addressable by early-stage companies (and by extension, traditional VC investment). The word “satellite” once described almost exclusively gigantic, extremely expensive hunks of sophisticated hardware, wherein each component would eat up the monthly burn rate of your average early-stage consumer tech venture.
Powered by WPeMatico
In-space shuttle service, Momentus, raises $25.5 million as investments climb for ‘new space’ tech
With commercial launch services expected to reach $7 billion by 2024, there’s increasing demand for an array of new technologies that can offer advantages to companies looking to get communications infrastructure in orbit.
That’s one of the reasons behind the new $25.5 million financing for Momentus, which sells in-space shuttle services to move satellites between orbits.
The company joins other satellite and telecommunications technology vendors like Akash Systems, which raised $14.5 million for its advanced telecommunications chipsets used in satellites, that have raised money from investors looking beyond basic launch services.
A motley assortment of venture capital firms, hedge funds, family offices and other institutional investors came in to finance the new round of funding for Momentus including: Y Combinator, the Lerner Family, the University of Wyoming Foundation, Quiet Capital, Mountain Nazca, ACE & Co., Liquid 2 Ventures and Drake Management. The financing was led by Prime Movers Lab.
With $34 million in funding to date, Momentus said it will use its new cash to continue the development of its two shuttles designed to move payloads between different orbits. As the space in space fills up, the ability to maneuver payloads once they reach low Earth orbit will become more important.
“In the past 18 months, Momentus has rapidly matured their water plasma propulsion system to deliver the world’s safest and most affordable in-space transportation services. They recently launched their first demonstration and are on track to radically reshape the landscape of the space economy,” said Dakin Sloss, founder and general partner at Prime Movers Lab, in a statement. “I look forward to Momentus delivering on their massive backlog of contracts and partnerships with NASA, SpaceX and other top players in the space ecosystem.”
A backlog of contracts is impressive, but the down payment on a potential flight is minimal compared to the ability to get on a vehicle, so companies tend to spread the wealth.
The money will also pay for building in-house research and development for the company’s technology and additional flight demonstrations throughout 2020, according to Momentus chief executive Mikhail Kokorich. The company expects to generate its first revenue next year, as well, Kokorich said.
The company has three flights scheduled for 2020.
Powered by WPeMatico
Dreaming of Mars, the startup Relativity Space gets its first launch site on Earth
3D-printing the first rocket on Mars.
That’s the goal Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone set for themselves when they founded Los Angeles-based Relativity Space in 2015.
At the time they were working from a WeWork in Seattle, during the darkest winter in Seattle history, where Ellis was wrapping up a stint at Blue Origin . The two had met in college at USC in their jet propulsion lab. Noone had gone on to take a job at SpaceX and Ellis at Blue Origin, but the two remained in touch and had an idea for building rockets quickly and cheaply — with the vision that they wanted to eventually build these rockets on Mars.
Now, more than $35 million dollars later, the company has been awarded a multi-year contract to build and operate its own rocket launch facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
That contract, awarded by The 45th Space Wing of the Air Force, is the first direct agreement the U.S. Air Force has completed with a venture-backed orbital launch company that wasn’t also being subsidized by billionaire owner-operators.
By comparison, Relativity’s neighbors at Cape Canaveral are Blue Origin (which Jeff Bezos has been financing by reportedly selling $1 billion in shares of Amazon stock since 2017); SpaceX (which has raised roughly $2.5 billion since its founding and initial capitalization by Elon Musk); and United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between the defense contracting giants Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Boeing Defense.
Like the other launch sites at Cape Canaveral, Launch Complex 16, where Relativity expects to be launching its first rockets by 2020, has a storied history in the U.S. space and missile defense program. It was used for Titan missile launches, the Apollo and Gemini programs and Pershing missile launches.
From the site, Relativity will be able to launch its first designed rocket, the Terran 1, which is the only fully 3D-printed rocket in the world.
That rocket can carry a maximum payload of 1,250 kilograms to a low earth orbit of 185 kilometers above the Earth. Its nominal payload is 900 kilograms of a Sun-synchronous orbit 500 kilometers out, and it has a 700 kilogram high-altitude payload capacity to 1,200 kilometers in Sun-synchronous orbit. Relativity prices its dedicated missions at $10 million, and $11,000 per kilogram to achieve Sun-synchronous orbit.
If the company’s two founders are right, then all of this launch work Relativity is doing is just a prelude to what the company considers to be its real mission — the advancement of manufacturing rockets quickly and at scale as a test run for building out manufacturing capacity on Mars.
“Rockets are the business model now,” Ellis told me last year at the company’s offices at the time, a few hundred feet from SpaceX. “That’s why we created the printing tech. Rockets are the largest, lightest-weight, highest-cost item that you can make.”
It’s also a way for the company to prove out its technology. “It benefits the long-term mission,” Ellis continued. “Our vision is to create the intelligent automated factory on Mars… We want to help them to iterate and scale the society there.”
Ellis and Noone make some pretty remarkable claims about the proprietary 3D printer they’ve built and housed in their Inglewood offices. Called “Stargate,” the printer is the largest of its kind in the world and aims to go from raw materials to a flight-ready vehicle in just 60 days. The company claims that the speed with which it can manufacture new rockets should pare down launch timelines by somewhere between two and four years.
Another factor accelerating Relativity’s race to market is a long-term contract the company signed last year with NASA for access to testing facilities at the agency’s Stennis Space Center on the Mississippi-Louisiana border. It’s there, deep in the Mississippi delta swampland, that Relativity plans to develop and quality control as many as 36 complete rockets per year on its 25-acre space.
All of this activity helps the company in another segment of its business: licensing and selling the manufacturing technology it has developed.
“The 3D factory and automation is the other product, but really that’s a change in emphasis,” says Ellis. “It’s always been the case that we’re developing our own metal 3D printing technology. Not only can we make rockets. If the long-term mission is 3D printing on Mars, we should think of the factory as its own product tool.”
Not everyone agrees. At least one investor I talked to said that in many cases, the cost of 3D printing certain basic parts outweighs the benefits that printing provides.
Still, Relativity is undaunted.
But first, the company — and its competitors at Blue Origin, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance and the hundreds of other companies working on launching rockets into space again — need to get there. For Relativity, the Canaveral deal is one giant step for the company, and one great leap toward its ultimate goal.
“This is a giant step toward being a launch company,” says Ellis. “And it’s aligned with the long-term vision of one day printing on Mars.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Elon Musk shows off the assembled Starship test rocket
After weeks of teasing renderings and production photos, Elon Musk finally showed off the finished Starship test rocket last night.
Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering. pic.twitter.com/k1HkueoXaz
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2019
As you can well see, the Starship test rocket has a stainless steel skin, which had a few people scratching their heads. Steel is indeed quite durable, but weighs more than other materials used in rockets, like carbon fiber, aluminum and titanium. Musk argues, however, that stainless steel’s resistance to extreme temperature, especially heat, makes it a better fit for this type of rocket.
The Starship rocket, previously called the BFR, is an integral piece of the SpaceX road map. It’s meant to take the place of the Falcon and Falcon Heavy rockets as a primary launch vehicle, which means lots of re-entry (which means lots of heat).
This test model, currently at the Boca Chica, Texas launch site, is meant for suborbital VTOL tests, which will take place in March. The orbital version will be taller, with thicker skins, and a more smoothly curving nose section, with launches on the books for 2020.
SpaceX first Starship hopper under Texas Boca Chica Beach’s cloudy sky.@elonmusk #Starship #SpaceX pic.twitter.com/hVg5Ken7Vp
— Evelyn Janeidy Arevalo (@JaneidyEve) January 10, 2019
Powered by WPeMatico
HPE and NASA make supercomputer on ISS available for experiments
Last year, HPE successfully built and installed a supercomputer on the International Space Station that could withstand the rigors of being in space. Today, the company announced that it is making that computer available for earth-based developers and scientists to conduct experiments.
Mark Fernandez, who has the lofty title of America’s HPC Technology Officer at HPE, says that the project was born with the idea that if we eventually go to Mars, we will need computers that can withstand the travel conditions of being in space for extended periods of time.
What’s more, because space computers have traditionally lacked the sophistication of earth-based computers, they conduct some of the work in space and then complete the calculations on earth. With an eye toward a Mars trip, this approach would not be feasible due to the distances and latency that would be involved. They needed a computer that could handle processing at the edge (in place) without sending data back to earth.
The original idea was to build a supercomputer with the state of the art off-the-shelf parts as and install it on the ISS as an experiment to see if this could work. They built the one teraflop computer in the summer of 2017 and launched it into space on a SpaceX rocket. The computer was built with Intel Broadwell processors, which Fernandez says were the best available at the time.
The first step was to see if the computer they built could handle the launch, the cold temperatures of waiting to be on-boarded, the solar radiation and generally uncommon conditions of being in space.
Once installed, they needed to figure out if this computer could operate in the power and cooling environment available onboard the ISS, which is not close to what you would have in earth-based datacenter with a highly controlled environment. Finally, once installed, would the computer operate correctly and give accurate answers.
The special sauce here was a package of software they call Hardened with Software. “We wrote a thin, lightweight way suite of software to quote-unquote, harden our systems of software, so you can take state of the art with you,” he said.
The computer was launched in August 2017 and has been operating ever since, and Fernandez says that it has worked according to plan. “So we’ve achieved our signed, dated and contracted mission. We have a one teraflop supercomputer on board the International Space Station with Intel Broadwell processors.” He says that supercomputer has flown around the earth 6000 times since launch.
The company now wants to open this computer up as a kind of service to earth-based developers and scientists to experiment with high-latency jobs that would have required some processing on earth. With the HPE Spaceborne Computer available to use, they can see what processing this information at the edge would be like (and if it would work). The computer will be in operation until some time next year, and in the meantime interested parties need to apply to HPE and NASA to get involved.
Powered by WPeMatico
SpaceX has authorized new shares that could value it at $24B
SpaceX has authorized a new Series I round for 3 million shares in a new round that will be worth up to $507 million, according to a certificate of incorporation document filed in Delaware.
If all shares in this round are issued, the new round would value SpaceX at around $23.7 billion, according to the new filing provided by Lagniappe Labs, creator of the Prime Unicorn Index. We’ve previously reported that SpaceX was planning to raise around $500 million in a financing round led by Fidelity, helping provide a lot of liquidity for the company as it begins to ramp up its plans to grow its ambitious launch schedule. While the filing does not confirm that it has raised the full $500 million, it serves as another data point to support that the company has picked up an additional huge influx of cash. The 3 million shares are priced at $169, in the range that we previously reported mid March.
The FCC in March gave SpaceX the green light to launch a network of thousands of satellites to blanket the globe with broadband access. Each additional flight offers SpaceX an opportunity to not only prove out its efficiency as a launching company, but also that it can provide a wide array of companies with a potentially cheaper option to get equipment into orbit for purposes like providing broadband. SpaceX already runs plenty of missions to the International Space Station. SpaceX also won a $290 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to launch three GPS satellites.
SpaceX isn’t the only company that may end up providing a new generation of orbital launches, like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Virgin Galactic also successfully tested its rocket-powered spacecraft for the first time since 2014 earlier this week, and while the details on that launch are still very slim it shows that there’s a wide variety of companies that see potential in figuring out a lower-cost way to get equipment into orbit.
We also previously reported that there could be a secondary offering that could also total up to $500 million in shares. That would run through special purpose vehicles, according to what we’re hearing, which would give investors an opportunity to get some liquidity in the company as it looks to remain private a little longer with the new financing.
We reached out to SpaceX for a comment and will update the story when we get back.
Powered by WPeMatico
Aurora hires SpaceX’s Jinnah Hosein, opens SF and Pittsburgh offices
Self-driving technology company Aurora has made some key moves on its leadership team and overall company growth: It’s bringing on SpaceX’s now former head of software engineering, Jinnah Hosein, to lead its own software engineering team in a VP role. The autonomous software provider is also opening up two new offices, including one in San Francisco, and another in Pittsburgh, in addition to its existing HQ in Palo Alto.
Bringing on Hosein is a huge move for Aurora, which will now have some additional senior leadership taken to help direct and organize its growing engineering team, according to Aurora co-founder Chris Urmson . Hosein’s background includes his time as VP of Software Engineering at SpaceX, where he spent the past four years and oversaw projects including the recent successful Falcon Heavy launch. Before that, he was Director of Software Engineering at Google working on Google Cloud, site reliability and other software projects.
“It’s a pretty incredible set of experiences he has,” Urmson said. “We’re just excited about him bringing that leadership capability, that experience in building both cloud and incredibly reliable software to our team and working with the rest of the folks here.”
Hosein also worked for a brief time overseeing Tesla’s software operations as well as SpaceX’s when he served as acting VP of Tesla’s Autopilot Software prior to Tesla hiring Apple’s Chris Lattner for the role. Urmson says that Hosein’s proven track record launching rockets, and organizing software projects on that level of complexity is more important to Aurora than any brief time he may have spent on Autopilot, however.
Aurora is also opening two new physical offices and testing locations, as mentioned, including the San Francisco one that Urmson says will be a welcome relief to some of their employees currently commuting south to Palo Alto, as well as a way to attract more talent looking to work in the city proper. The Pittsburgh office gives them a new testbed, where they can prove their tech in inclement driving conditions and adverse winter weather, and it also puts them in close proximity to Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh’s robotics talent pool.
“When you combine that, between the offices we have in the South Bay, the San Francisco test areas that we’ll now have more access to and the Pittsburgh test areas, we have a pretty exciting diversity of test environments and places to operate,” Urmson added.
Aurora has already announced partnerships with Volkswagen, Hyundai, Byton and more, and recently added LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi to its board.
Powered by WPeMatico
Watch Elon Musk’s keynote where he announced SpaceX’s new rocket and Mars colonization
Elon Musk gave a keynote address yesterday to the International Aeronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia. During the 43 minute talk, which is embedded above, Musk laid out SpaceX’s future including colonizing Mars and building one rocket to rule them all. The talk is fantastic. Elon was Elon and revealed countless details about future SpaceX plans. This is why he’s celebrated… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico