Tired: rockets Wired: fully reusable single-stage-to orbit, horizontal-takeoff-and-landing spaceplane That, in a not-so-concise nutshell, is the driving force behind Renton, WA-based Radian Aerospace. After six years, the startup finally emerged from stealth Wednesday to announce its spaceplane ambitions and a $27.5M seed round. One part rocket science and another part going where no company has gone before, Radian […]
Yesterday, NASA hosted an Advisory Council meeting to recap 2021 and discuss updates to many of its programs, including Artemis and the ISS, with the public. Mission update: Ax-1, the first all-private astronaut trip to the ISS, has apparently slipped a month to March 31. The agency didn’t elaborate on the change. Artemis updates: The much-anticipated lunar […]
Space is “increasingly contested, congested, and competitive,” NATO writes in its newly released overarching space policy (emphasis ours). Those three C’s in space require allies to be ready to “operate in a disrupted, denied, and degraded environment.” Monday represents NATO’s first public articulation of its space policy. NATO first declared space an operational domain and created a classified policy in late […]
PitchBook and NVCA have released their Q4 ’21 Venture Monitor. If there’s one thing that’s evident, it’s that VCs had plenty to be happy about last year: Deal value for US startups nearly doubled year-over-year to $330B. Public listings, SPACs, and M&A activity drove over $680B in exit value (nearly 3x the previous record). VC fundraising […]
Pentagon procurements are on pause until the federal government passes the full-year defense appropriations bill, USSF Chief of Space Operations John W. Raymond and other DoD officials testified Wednesday. Backstory: The government is currently operating on a stopgap spending bill, or continuing resolution (CR), that ends Feb. 28. Congress is considering passing a yearlong CR, stretching […]
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 […]
Goldman Sachs has initiated coverage of Planet (NYSE:PL) with a buy rating and $11 price target, implying an upside 80+%. $PL traded up ~10.5% on Wednesday. Earth observation (EO) company Planet went public (via SPAC, obviously) in early December, in a deal valuing the company at $2.8B. The company’s stock has fallen by ~50% since […]
Yesterday, newly public Virgin Orbit (NASDAQ:VORB) held a pre-flight press briefing for its upcoming Above the Clouds mission. Virgin’s LauncherOne rocket and Cosmic Girl will take off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California, and follow a flight path approximated in the graphic above. Manifest: Four Pentagon R&D satellites, a NASA-sponsored university payload, two nanosatellites for Polish […]
A flagship European satellite has a power issue. Sentinel-1B (S-1B), an Earth observation satellite, hasn’t been generating data since Dec. 23, when ESA noticed an issue with the Sentinel and switched off its powerful radar platform. According to an alert published Monday, ESA was unable to restore the power needed for radar operations in recent days. Sentinel 101: ESA […]
Ed. note: Read Part One of this story here. Last week, the US Space Force (USSF) detailed how it would tap the private sector with orbital debris removal services. Beyond relatively small funding awards, how might governments more holistically address the problem of space junk? Here’s a few ideas. 1) Accept responsibility. “When it comes to liabilities and […]
Where in the world is Perseverance? The NASA rover is wandering around Mars’s Jezero Crater right now, gathering evidence and samples in titanium tubes for scientists back on Earth to analyze for evidence of microbes. The agency and its partners are developing a mission for late this decade to ferry those samples back to Earth no earlier […]
The Space Force (USSF) is hoping to gin up demand for debris removal by eventually buying services directly from the private sector. “We need your help,” USSF Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David Thompson said in a recent video addressed to the private sector (H/T SpaceNews). The vision here = “Aggressively explore [debris removal] […]
