Maine’s Plan to Build a Sustainable Space Industry
“Maine is more than lobsters and blueberries.”
Stories about the new players changing the space game.
“Maine is more than lobsters and blueberries.”
“As the NASA administrator, I had a lot of challenges with traditional Hall thrusters,” Bridenstine told Payload. “When I came across this company that’s doing electric propulsion, they can provide as much thrust and as much efficiency as a traditional hull thruster, but do it with a variety of different fuels, I got excited about it.”
The system will prove out technology that could eventually grab objects on orbit, allowing KMI to move debris out of congested orbital lanes or relocate satellites that don’t have enough juice to move themselves.
Charter estimates that approximately 97% of the ~10,500 active satellites on orbit are uninsured. Tens of billions of dollars worth of satellite technology is flying around without a financial safety net.
“Hyperspectral is such a buzz word.”
The license was “our last gate to fly.”
“We didn’t punch it as far as we could, but what we saw was a much more stable, cleaner burn,” CEO Sascha Deri told Payload.
The Aptos terminal integrates on-orbit processing, communication capabilities, and cloud services to enable satellites to run AI systems in orbit.
“This has just emerged as an opportunity, and also happens to be a pretty big market in and of itself.”
“We wanted to get to market faster than everyone, and we have.”
While the company has won large contracts for its wildfire monitoring capabilities it’s also recognizing new verticals where its data can drive commercial interest.