Stories about military and national security missions in orbit.
United Launch Alliance, a joint venture formed in 2006, may soon have a new corporate home. That’s because co-owners Boeing ($BA) and Lockheed Martin ($LMT) are reportedly putting ULA up for sale, according to a blockbuster story last week from Ars Technica’s Eric Berger. Morgan Stanley and Bain were hired to facilitate the transaction, which […]
Yesterday, SF-based Astranis announced that it won a Space Force contract worth up to $10.5M to build resilient and jam-resistant waveform technology into its MicroGEO broadband birds. The Phase III Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award includes $4.5M for Astranis to incorporate Protected Tactical Waveform technology into its software-defined radio payloads, along with a $6M […]
This morning, Maxar ($MAXR) announced that it has won a contract worth $192M over five years to supply American allies with high-res optical, SAR and 3D imagery. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) award falls under the Foreign Commercial Imagery Program. The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract will see the US and its allies tap data […]
On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that it is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon over the continental US. The balloon is suspected to be Chinese in origin. Based on the fact patterns, we’re not really rushing to conclusions when we say Washington has a high level of analytic confidence that the balloon is definitely Chinese in […]
On Friday, the US Treasury Department placed sanctions on Spacety, a Chinese smallsat developer and SAR provider, due its ties to Russian paramilitary organization Wagner Group. Backing up: The Wagner Group is Russia’s private military firm and is credited with major crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine, the Central African Republic, and Mali. The […]
The aerospace & defense (A&D) primes started reporting fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, with Raytheon ($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. […]
After a 50-year hiatus, the US is planning to test a nuclear fission-powered thermal propulsion system on a spacecraft. NASA said this week that it would team up with DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D arm, to build, launch, and demonstrate a nuclear thermal engine. This early work is intended to pave the way for a crewed […]
Roscosmos and Arianespace are in talks to swap a batch of OneWeb satellites for several Soyuz components that have each been stranded in each other’s territory since February of last year, RussianSpaceWeb reports. The road to today: When Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022, collaboration between Russia and Europe came to an almost immediate halt. […]
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 […]
For the first orbital launch of 2023, SpaceX’s Transporter-6 mission launched 114 small satellites into orbit. The spacecraft on the manifest ranged from cubesats to hosted payloads to orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs). The Transporter satellite rideshare missions increasingly remind us of nesting dolls, as they launch space vehicles that in turn deploy even more space […]
Can you believe 2022 is nearly over? It’s been a jam-packed year for the space industry, full of groundbreaking moments in science, turbulence in the markets and world order; substantive policy developments; and historic mission firsts. We’re kicking off our year-end coverage by looking at objects closest in the rear-view mirror. Payload combed through the […]
Last week, Congress released a compromise defense bill with $858B in topline funding. That represents a ~10% annual increase over last year. The fine text: The fiscal year 2023 (FY23) National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) compromise bill went to the House floor last week, and was passed in the lower chamber by a 350-80 vote. […]
