Up and away Lucy went in the wee hours of Saturday morning, hitching a ride on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. The robotic asteroid hunter is now traveling at a brisk ~67,000 mph, per NASA. Lucy blasted off from launch complex 41 in Cape Canaveral at 5:34 AM ET. The launch of the Lockheed-built […]
Cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, actress Yulia Peresild, and director Klim Shipenko landed in Kazakhstan yesterday. Novitskiy was in space for 191 days; Peresild and Shipenko were there for 12. The crew’s Soyuz MS-18 undocked from the ISS at 9:14 ET on Saturday night and landed just after midnight. Unexpected plot twist: Due to unintentional MS-18 thruster firing, the ISS […]
Yesterday, China successfully launched a Long March 2D rocket to orbit, carrying the H-alpha Solar Explorer and 10 additional small satellites. H-alpha is China’s debut solar observatory, SpaceNews reports. The telescope-equipped spacecraft is headed for 517-KM, sun-synchronous orbit. The mission was China’s 37th orbital launch of 2021. Next up: Shenzhou 13. Hours after this hits your […]
Orbit Fab and the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have struck a partnership to share technology and R&D. What does that mean in practice? Per yesterday’s announcement, Orbit Fab will share the specs of RAFTI, its on-orbit refueling port, with AFRL. In return, AFRL will review Orbit Fab’s refueling tech, “advise on requirements and designs,” […]
t’s already been a banner year for VCs and we still have three months to go. That’s the takeaway from the Venture Monitor report, published by PitchBook and NVCA this morning. Let’s break out the “space tech” investment data. Since 2016, space tech has accounted for ~1.2% of all VC funding. That proportion jumps around in quite […]
This morning, Spaced Ventures (SV) announced a $1.2 million seed round led by WorldQuant Ventures. Founded one year ago, the startup recently opened its space crowdfunding platform to the public in beta mode. SV will use the new capital to scale its crowdfunding offering and launch a new product for accredited investors. “There’s been this old narrative […]
Yesterday, Astra gave the space community—and its investors—a twofer. The small rocket company has set a date for its next launch attempt: Oct. 27–31 (or Nov. 7–12, if needed). LV0007, Astra’s seventh rocket, will carry a test payload for the US Space Force and launch from Kodiak, Alaska. Astra offered up an explanation of what […]
Space Capital has published its quarterly report tracking private investment in the space sector. Investors put roughly $8.7 billion to work in Q3 2021, backing a total of 112 space companies. In Q3, while the lion’s share of money went to growth- and late-stage companies, smaller startups pulled in $1.5 billion and represented 59% of all deals closed. NB: Space […]
Yesterday, Varda Space Industries said it would launch its first microgravity factory as a Falcon 9 rideshare mission in early 2023. Founded last year and incubated at Founders Fund, Varda has raised $50+ million from VCs. In selecting SpaceX, Varda “immediately went with what we were comfortable with,”cofounder and president Delian Asparouhov told Payload. “It […]
An Iranian hacking group has targeted a global array of aerospace and telecom companies since at least 2018, according to research published by Cybereason last week. The Boston cybersecurity firm refers to the previously unidentified cyber group as “MalKamak.” MalKamak’s espionage campaign was dubbed “Operation Ghostshell.” Cybereason, which discovered the group earlier this year, didn’t name the […]
CesiumAstro has successfully launched its first two CubeSats into space, hitching a ride Monday with NASA’s Landsat-9. HQ’d just outside Austin in Bee Cave, TX, CesiumAstro’s secret sauce is its active phased array payload. Coupled with the company’s software-defined radio and digital backend, the phased array could let satellite operators electronically steer and target beams. […]
Arkisys is a space infrastructure-as-a-service startup that’s stayed relatively quiet about engineering efforts until this week. Yesterday, the Southern California startup revealed a “port module wedge,” the first tangible building block toward its goal of creating an orbital outpost. At a Pasadena, CA, event, Arkisys showed off the ~1x~1 meter component to a group of […]
