On Friday, SpaceX added a new page to its website for Starshield. The product is billed as a secure satellite networking solution for government users and national security missions, and it marks the latest expansion of SpaceX’s portfolio of services. Starshield’s initial focus spans three functions: Extra security baked in…Beyond the end-to-end encryption protocols standard […]
The Pentagon is getting into investing. Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin established a new Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), which aims to give the DoD the ability to work more closely with private capital. Why get into capital markets? Right now, the DoD’s mechanisms for helping new, important technologies hop the “valley of death” […]
‘Twas a busy time in Paris last week. The European Space Agency announced a new cohort of astronauts and announced a budget of €16.9B for the next three years. The sum falls short of the €18.5B requested by the agency, but still represents a 17% increase over the prior period. Lots of 17s last week: […]
In September 2020, a team of astronomers made waves across the scientific community when they reported they’d identified phosphine, a potential marker of life, in the atmosphere of Venus. Now, NASA says those findings were too good to be true. What’s the big deal about Venus? Venus remains somewhat of a mystery to us. It’s […]
TV…Did Not Kill the Radio Star? SiriusXM ($SIRI) announced Tuesday that it has commissioned Maxar ($MAXR) to build SXM-11 and SXM-12, two new geostationary satellites. The deal doubles the number of SiriusXM satellites in the pipeline. Last year, the American broadcaster ordered SXM-9 and -10 from Maxar. As a matter of fact, these two go […]
A satellite launched earlier this year is now one of the single brightest objects in the night sky. AST SpaceMobile ($ASTS) has plans in the works to build a constellation of ~100 satellites in LEO that would be akin to “cell towers in space.” In September, the Odessa, TX company launched BlueWalker 3, its long-awaited […]
There’s about to be a new Moon mission in play. SpaceX is set to launch the HAKUTO-R mission from Cape Canaveral, beginning a small Japanese company’s long journey to softly place a lander on the lunar surface. The Falcon 9 launch for ispace scrubbed early this morning to take extra precautions before liftoff, and has […]
Within a decade, a startup known for building cheap 3D-printed houses on Earth is hoping to bring the materials cost for building structures on the lunar surface down to zero. Austin-based ICON said this morning that it won a $57.2M Phase III SBIR award from NASA that will bring its 3D printing technology all the […]
South Korea is set to soon get its own NASA counterpart. That’s the plan, President Yoon Suk-yeol said Monday. Yoon laid out ambitious plans for bolstering his nation’s space economy, including goals to land a spacecraft on the Moon by 2032 and Mars by 2045. The 2045 Mars landing is aptly timed for the 100th […]
SynMax, a satellite data analytics startup specializing in oil, gas and dark ship monitoring, has raised a $6M seed round from a group of existing customers. Bill Perkins, an energy trader and cofounder of SkyFi, and GeoSol Capital LLC participated in the round. What’s the name of the game for SynMax? The Houston startup is […]
SpaceX launched its 26th ISS resupply mission on Saturday, hoisting roughly 7,700 pounds of hardware, food, cubesats, and scientific experiments to the station. NASA and SpaceX scrubbed a liftoff earlier in the week due to uncooperative weather. For the CRS-26 mission, SpaceX used a brand-new Falcon 9 booster (tail number B1076) and Cargo Dragon capsule. […]
On Wednesday, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher announced the newest class of European astronauts. The new recruits, the first in 13 years, will kick off a one-year basic training program at ESA’s European Astronaut Center in the spring. Unlike previous classes, the new class of astronaut corps is split among three distinct groups: […]
