From Tuesday to Wednesday, TechCrunch held TC Sessions: Space 2021, with excellent programming and speakers from startupland, the investment community, NASA, academia, and more. We took diligent notes and wanted to share some of the notable highlights below. Debris: A spacecraft is 10X more likely to be hit by a dead satellite or cataloged debris than an […]
CesiumAstro, an Austin-based software communication system developer, has announced plans to accelerate production on the second generation of its active phased array product, Nightingale. The software-defined steerable array can attach to satellites to provide inter-satellite and ground connectivity and is optimized for lunar and cislunar applications. The acceleration was prompted by a Phase II NASA SBIR grant […]
STOKE Space Technologies announced this morning that it has raised a $65M Series A. The Seattle space startup is developing a fully reusable rocket. Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the round, which was joined by new investors Spark Capital, Point72 Ventures, Toyota Ventures, Alameda Research, and Global Founders Capital. Existing investors who also joined: NFX, MaC […]
Albedo has been approved to sell 10-cm commercial satellite imagery, the startup announced yesterday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has granted a first-of-its-kind license to Albedo, allowing it to sell satellite imagery at a resolution of 10 cm/pixel. That’s more granular than anything commercially offered today. Changing times…A few decades ago, the US greenlighted […]
Things are picking up in space tourism. Over the weekend, a record-breaking 19 people were in space at once during Blue Origin’s six-passenger tourist flight. And it’s only going up from there. Over the last week, two flights carrying eight total private space tourists launched: Blue Origin’s NS-19 mission carrying Michael Strahan et al to […]
Virgin Orbit and Spire Global have signed a buzzer-beating deal to send a Spire space debris-monitoring satellite to orbit. The satellite will launch aboard Virgin’s “Above the Clouds” LauncherOne mission later this month. The deal went through in record time, as the satellite gained FAA approval and was integrated within a day and a half […]
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed in the House on Tuesday night. The final version of the must-pass defense bill was edited and eliminated language about creating a Space National Guard. The bipartisan bill is now with the Senate, where it is expected to pass before landing on POTUS’s desk to be signed into law. The highlights: In all, […]
This week, SF-based Astranis announced a $90M deal with Andesat, a Latin American telco, to provide broadband capacity to cell towers in Peru. Astranis’s satellite will extend connectivity to underserved, remote pockets of Peru—and help cell networks leapfrog from 2G to 4G across the country. It’s a “landmark deal,” Astranis cofounder and CEO John Gedmark […]
Payload spoke with Anil Menon, Deniz Burnham, and Jack Hathaway, three of the ten candidates in NASA’s new astronaut class. The astronauts-to-be talked with us about their unique and winding paths to this point, their passion for space, and their hopes for the Artemis generation of lunar exploration. Anil Menon, a US Air Force lieutenant […]
Loft Orbital, an SF-based space infrastructure-as-a-service startup, has announced a $140M fundraising round led by BlackRock, with participation from CEAS Investments, Foundation Capital, Uncork Capital, Ubiquity VC, and others. Loft 101: The startup abstracts away the complexity of going to space by handling payload integration, satellite launches, regulatory compliance, ground stations, data transmission, and on-orbit […]
Euroconsult has published the 24th edition of “satellites to be built & launched.” The report serves as the gold standard for market intelligence on, you guessed it, building and launching satellites. The European consultancy expects 17,000 satellites to be launched over the next decade. The migration to LEO and deployment of tiny, lightweight satellites are evident in the […]
Last week, a Russian government official announced on state television that Russian ASAT capabilities could wipe out 32 NATO GPS satellites. That’d leave users around the world without access to navigation services…and US weapons systems without a compass. Sitting ducks? As of Nov. 11, there were 26 operational GPS satellites out of 31 total in orbit. That number has been as high […]
