Stories about the new players changing the space game.
Belgium-based geospatial analytics startup Aerospacelab announced it has raised a 40M Euro (~$45.5M) Series B co-led by Airbus Ventures and XAnge. Octave & Miroslaw Klaba, SRIW, Noshaq, BNP Paribas Private Equity, Sambrinvest, and Belaero also participated in the round. Aerospacelab 101: Founded in 2018, Aerospacelab is already no small operation, with two offices and 110+ full time employees. The business centers […]
Today, Hawthorne-based Launcher announced the appointment of Tim Berry as head of manufacturing. Berry spent over eight years across town at SpaceX, most recently serving as manager of additive manufacturing. Before that, he led teams integrating SpaceX Dragon Crew and Cargo spacecraft. And from 2013 to 2019, Berry oversaw the production of 90 flight-rated Falcon 9 […]
Taking a page from e-commerce’s playbook, Ursa Space has added one-click ordering to its SAR imagery platform. Processing Ursa’s business, piece by piece: SAR, or synthetic aperture radar, has 24-hour, all-weather, cloud cover-piercing persistent sensing capabilities. The technique can be especially useful for object and change detection. But in its natural and raw form, SAR data is […]
On Monday, E-Space came right out of the gate with ambitious mega-constellation aspirations. The startup has raised a $50M seed from Prime Movers Lab, which it says will fully fund two “beta” satellite test batches, launching in March and then the end of 2022. E-Space also claims that mass production is set to begin in […]
Launcher has reserved three more missions for Orbiter, its orbital transfer tug, to Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) on future SpaceX Transporter rideshares. The Hawthorne, CA-based space transportation startup’s first Orbiter mission is scheduled to fly on Transporter-6 in October. Last-mile services: The Orbiter vehicle is designed to link up with satellites that have reached generic orbits through rideshare missions […]
Wyvern has received a CAD $4M (~$3.2M) investment from STDC, just weeks after the Canadian satellite imaging startup announced a $4.5M seed round and its inclusion in Y Combinator’s Winter 22 (W22) batch. STDC, or Sustainable Development Technology Canada, is an “arm’s-length” foundation funded by the Canadian government. STDC’s grant is non-dilutive and tied to […]
This morning, SCOUT Inc. announced an autonomy suite for spacecraft operators to better understand what’s going on way above our heads. Alexandria, VA-based Scout’s tech stack for satellites and spacecraft spans data fusion software, proximity operation algorithms, pose estimation, docking assistance, star-tracking, and attitude determination. Put all of the above together and you get Scout […]
Isar Aerospace has won 10 million euros (~$11.3M) in prize money from the European Commission’s “Low-Cost Space Launch” competition. The prize specifically recognizes Spectrum, Isar’s two-stage orbital launch vehicle for small and medium satellites. Founded in 2018, Isar is based in Ottobrunn and Munich, Germany. Spain’s PLD Space and Rocket Factory Augsburg, another aspiring German launcher, were […]
Mission Space, a startup out of Luxembourg focusing on space weather awareness and forecasting, has signed a contract with EnduroSat, a Bulgarian nanosatellite startup, to launch the first private space weather forecasting payloads in Q4 2022. EnduroSat will also be one of the first customers for Mission Space’s “nowcasting” analytics platform. The companies say the […]
Atomos Space announced yesterday that it raised $5M total in 2021, thanks to checks from Cantos Ventures, a deep tech VC, and another unnamed investor. The Denver-based company is developing an orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) that can find and attach to satellites and tow them to more desirable locations. “We really want to be the […]
CesiumAstro, an Austin-based software communication system developer, has announced plans to accelerate production on the second generation of its active phased array product, Nightingale. The software-defined steerable array can attach to satellites to provide inter-satellite and ground connectivity and is optimized for lunar and cislunar applications. The acceleration was prompted by a Phase II NASA SBIR grant […]
Albedo has been approved to sell 10-cm commercial satellite imagery, the startup announced yesterday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has granted a first-of-its-kind license to Albedo, allowing it to sell satellite imagery at a resolution of 10 cm/pixel. That’s more granular than anything commercially offered today. Changing times…A few decades ago, the US greenlighted […]
