Charter Space’s insurance product is open for early access, Yuk Chi Chan, CEO of Charter Space, announced at SXSW yesterday.
The CA-based space program management startup partnered with five of the largest space insurers around the world—including Munich Re, AXA XL, ASIC, and Lloyds of London broker Price Forbes—to collaborate on a system with the goal of increasing access to insurance across the space industry.
Space insurance typically covers expensive assets in GEO, where premiums are high enough to justify the high costs of the underwriting process. As a result, coverage remains out of reach for the vast majority of space companies launching smaller, cheaper sats into orbit.
Charter estimates that ~3% of operational sats are covered against loss and third-party damage, and for sats in LEO that number is less than 1%.
Enter Charter: The company has combined its Ubik operating system, which manages the documentation of complex space programs during development, with an AI-powered underwriting tool to help insurance providers automate some of the underwriting process.
Charter’s space insurance product will make it easier for insurers to perform their due diligence on space assets, lowering the cost of the underwriting process, and, ultimately, the cost of premiums.
Chan hopes the system will change the economics of the space industry. If more smallsats can land affordable insurance, he predicted, venture capitalists will be more comfortable investing in startups with ambitions for orbit.
So far, the company has a backlog of 100+ spacecraft manufacturers on the waitlist for the insurance product, and successive iterations of the product will offer an increasingly comprehensive set of engineering risk, analytics, and underwriting tools.
