Startups
Stories about the new players changing the space game.
Q+A with Tim Ellis on Relativity’s Mars Mission
Last week, Relativity Space and Impulse Space announced a partnership to launch the first private mission to Mars. To much fanfare, the two startups say they’ll try to launch a Red Planet lander as early as 2024. Under the agreement, Relativity will launch Impulse’s Mars Cruise Vehicle and Mars Lander on the 3D-printed Terran R…
Northrop Selects Solstar for Lunar Gateway Internet
While government-operated orbital outposts may not have the amenities of future private stations, in-space internet, it would appear, will be table stakes. Driving the news: NASA’s Lunar Gateway module, set to begin launching in a few years, will serve as a comms hub, a research lab, short-term living quarters for astronauts, and a holding bay…
Who’s Who: Lunar Landers and Rovers
As NASA prepares to send humans back to the moon through its long-awaited Artemis program, it’s taking big steps to encourage commercial lander development. First order of business: CLPS. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program is funding 14 separate lander concepts from Astrobotic, Deep Space Systems, Draper Labs, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Lockheed Martin,…
Combating Illegal Fishing with Space-Based Edge Computing
Satellite data can do many things for governments. One under-discussed use case is giving them a leg up against illegal fishing. A team of startups aims to use space-based edge computing to get fishing insights in near real-time. Edge computing = localized computing, in this case on a satellite. Los Angeles-HQ’d Exo-Space will provide their…
Recapping the First Six Months of 2022 in Space
We’ve made it halfway through 2022. The year has flown by, but it’s been filled with big news and firsts for the space industry. Here’s our recap of the off-Earth goings-on during these last six months. Q1 The year started off with a bang as JWST unfolded successfully, reached its new home a million miles…
NASA Prepares for CAPSTONE
On Monday, NASA and Rocket Lab are set to launch a pathfinding mission that will probe out a peculiar orbit around the moon that could be used for the Gateway lunar station in a few more years. CAPSTONE, as the mission is known, stands for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment. The…
QuadSAT Banks Additional €500,000
QuadSAT said today that it’s received €500,000 ($520,000) in additional ESA funding under the ARTES program. The European funds are earmarked for satcom companies looking to productize and commercialize core technology they’ve developed. QuadSAT’s core technology The Danish startup has paired specialized radiofrequency (RF) payloads with quadcopter drones. The company’s engineers have also written code…
Cloud to Street Partners to Launch Parametric Flood Insurance Product in Colombia
Last week, NYC-based Cloud to Street announced a partnership with Raincoat, a parametric insurance provider, and Munich Re Group, a major international reinsurer. The three are launching a flood insurance product in Colombia. The national program will make flood insurance policies available to 100,000+ Colombian farmers for the first time. In effect, that means that…
JWST Sustains Micrometeoroid Impact
Earlier this year, we held our breaths for weeks as the super-powerful and highly delicate JWST made a galactic journey a million miles away to its final orbit and unfolded all its individual components. The observatory had 344 single points of failure in its deployment phase. In January, NASA announced that the telescope had fully…
ION-X raises €3.8 million for disruptive smallsat thruster solution
French startup ION-X has raised €3.8M ($4.1M) to fund further R&D and field a demo mission of its scalable small satellite propulsion system. Joining the round: Bpifrance, the French public investment bank. TF Participations, the investment arm of deeptech startup studio TechnoFounders. Geodesic, an investment vehicle that will make way for the future Expansion fund,…
Ursa Major Unveils Arroway
Render of Ursa Major’s Arroway heavy-launch engine. Image: Ursa Major. Ursa Major has unveiled its engine for heavy launch vehicles. The Colorado startup is calling its latest propulsion product Arroway, a nod to Dr. Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster’s character in Contact. Arroway specs: 200,000-pound thrust, liquid oxygen and methane staged combustion, mostly 3D printed, and…
A Partnership Built to Combat Space Trash
OneWeb, Astroscale, the UK Space Agency, and ESA have partnered to launch a space junk servicer by 2024. The partnership comes with a €14.8 million ($15.8 million) investment that will allow Astrocale to advance its ELSA-M debris removal spacecraft from design through manufacturing and up to the satellite’s pre-integration phase. Once launched, ELSA-M will complete…
AstroForge Raises $13M Seed Round
AstroForge, an asteroid-mining startup and Y Combinator alum, has raised a $13M seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Seven Seven Six, EarthRise, Aera VC, Liquid 2, and Soma. AstroForge 101: Cofounders Matt Gialich and Jose Acain hail from Virgin Orbit and SpaceX, where they embraced a high-risk, fail-fast Silicon Valley mindset. The…
