On Wednesday morning, shareholders are set to vote on Intuitive Machines’s reverse merger with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp ($IPAX), a Nasdaq-listed SPAC. If investors vote to approve the de-SPAC, the combined entity will be listed under the new ticker symbol $LUNR. SPAC facts, at a glance Intuitive Machines, headquartered in Houston, announced its intentions to […]
On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that it is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon over the continental US. The balloon is suspected to be Chinese in origin. Based on the fact patterns, we’re not really rushing to conclusions when we say Washington has a high level of analytic confidence that the balloon is definitely Chinese in […]
This week, Orbital Sidekick announced a $10M raise from a group of strategic and existing investors. Energy Innovation Capital led the round, with energy firms Williams and ONEOK participating. The University of Minnesota’s endowment fund, 11.2 Capital, Syndicate 708, and In-Q-Tel also joined the round. Six-year-old, SF-based Orbital Sidekick is preparing to launch a six-bird […]
Later today, two trailblazing American astronauts will receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor at the White House. The details: Vice President Kamala Harris will award former NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken the medal at 4:15pm ET today. The medal was last awarded to Robert Crippen, the pilot of the first space shuttle […]
The aerospace & defense (A&D) primes started reporting fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, with Raytheon ($RTX) teeing off first, followed by Lockheed Martin ($LMT), Boeing ($BA), General Dynamics ($GD), and Northrop Grumman ($NOC) this morning. Across the board, companies’ results and forward-looking projections were on the one hand buoyed by sky-high American and allied defense budgets. […]
Last week, Payload cofounder Mo Islam had the pleasure of sitting down with three top VCs: Anton Brevde from Prime Movers Lab, Michelle Volz from a16z, and Shahin Farschi from Lux Capital. The hour-long conversation covered the state of the economy, the fundraising environment for space companies, and predictions for 2023. We’ve curated some of […]
Breaking: Whale, Bird Will Skip Across Pond This week, Inmarsat and Airbus announced the kind of complicated logistical operation that you can only see in the space sector. But for this specific mission, neither company is launching anything into space yet. Instead, they’re shipping a next-gen GEO satellite across the Atlantic. Unpacking the announcement Airbus […]
2022 was the second largest year of ADG deal-making on record, according to a comprehensive analysis published Wednesday by market intelligence firm HigherGov. BTW…ADG = aerospace, defense, and government, and M&A = mergers and acquisitions. With this one simple trick—using ADG and M&A rather than writing the phrases out in full—we’ve given you seconds of […]
Doug Abts is joining Astranis’s C-suite as its new chief commercial officer. Abts, a former Navy SEAL and grad of Harvard Business School, comes to Astranis by way of Viasat, where he was GM of the publicly traded company’s in-flight connectivity (IFC) business. Abts grew Viasat’s IFC biz into a “multi-hundred million dollar in annual […]
Today, satellite startup Quub emerged from stealth mode with two Air Force contracts in tow. Pronounced like “cube,” the Lancaster, PA-based startup bills itself as a “data company,” placing an emphasis on the value of its eventual downstream analytics products. But don’t get it twisted—Quub is taking a verticalized approach to Earth observation (EO) and […]
Virgin Orbit’s historic first launch from the Spaceport Cornwall in the United Kingdom, Start Me Up, failed to reach orbit on Monday evening. Shares of Virgin Orbit ($VORB) were off by as much as 22% in pre-market trading on Tuesday morning. What happened? Virgin Orbit reported that LauncherOne had reached space, but the webcast’s mission […]
In its flagship Space Economy Report published this morning, Paris-based Euroconsult finds that the space market grew 8% in 2022. This report is the gold standard for market intelligence on the end-to-end space economy, from upstream manufacturers to downstream service providers and end users across civil, military, and commercial space. The space value chain… …as […]
