Space Capital Publishes Q4 2022 Investment Report
Space Capital has released its final quarterly report on the 2022 investing landscape. It was a tough year for fundraising, as the froth drained from the free-flowing capital markets of years past. Though the space industry saw receding levels of capital deployment, the report’s authors remain optimistic about the sector’s ability to bounce back. 2022…
ClearSpace Closes €26.7 million Series A
Swiss-based startup ClearSpace has closed a €26.7M ($28.9M) Series A. The in-orbit servicing and active space debris removal startup will use the funding to accelerate its progress towards missions on the horizon. “The market is now developing, much faster than we had expected, and we look forward to accelerating our activities to meet the urgent…
Citizen Science Initiative on Light Pollution Reveals a Brightening Sky
To get a clear, untouched view of the night sky, a person has to travel to the remotest corners of the Earth, far from any city or town where artificial light blocks out the delicate light from the stars. The sky that most of humanity sees at night is obscured by a filmy haze of…
Airbus to Fly Inmarsat’s Next-Gen Satellite to Florida
Breaking: Whale, Bird Will Skip Across Pond This week, Inmarsat and Airbus announced the kind of complicated logistical operation that you can only see in the space sector. But for this specific mission, neither company is launching anything into space yet. Instead, they’re shipping a next-gen GEO satellite across the Atlantic. Unpacking the announcement Airbus…
Roscosmos and Arianespace Consider Exchange
Roscosmos and Arianespace are in talks to swap a batch of OneWeb satellites for several Soyuz components that have each been stranded in each other’s territory since February of last year, RussianSpaceWeb reports. The road to today: When Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022, collaboration between Russia and Europe came to an almost immediate halt.…
Stell Raises $3.1M Pre-Seed for Aerospace Workflow Platform
Stell, a startup building an efficient workflow platform for the aerospace industry, announced this morning the closing of a $3.1M pre-seed round led by Wischoff Ventures and Third Prime VC. The comms problem: When it comes to communicating the deeply complex, technical information critical to aerospace engineering, a lot can get lost in translation. “The…
SkyFi Launches Satellite Imagery App
SkyFi believes that satellite imagery should be easily accessible and affordable for anyone to access. Today, the Austin, TX startup took a major step toward democratizing that data with the public launch of its mobile and web apps. The story so far: SkyFi built an entirely new app and interface for individuals to task satellites…
DoD Releases Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Report
Through 60 Minutes, Congress, and incremental declassification, American citizens have been treated to a closer look into what the US government’s “aliens(???)” desktop folder looks like. Driving the news: The intelligence community’s (IC) quest to understand elusive UFO-esque unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings has borne fruit. Those fruits, though, don’t offer any conclusive evidence of…
Uncertain Future Hangs over Esrange Inauguration
The Swedish Space Corporation completed the inauguration of its Esrange orbital launch facility today with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The ceremony was attended by Swedish and European dignitaries, including the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf; President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen; and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. The trio concluded the short…
JWST and TESS Spot Rocky, Earth-like Exoplanets
JWST has confirmed its first exoplanet—and it’s a good one. Using the NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument aboard the orbiting telescope, scientists identified an exoplanet (i.e., a planet in a star system besides our own) in the LHS 475 star system that’s about as similar to Earth as any we’ve found. The planet, called LHS 475…
Aerospace, Defense M&A Sees Second Busiest Year Ever
2022 was the second largest year of ADG deal-making on record, according to a comprehensive analysis published Wednesday by market intelligence firm HigherGov. BTW…ADG = aerospace, defense, and government, and M&A = mergers and acquisitions. With this one simple trick—using ADG and M&A rather than writing the phrases out in full—we’ve given you seconds of…
EU Lends SES $323M for Trio of Broadcast Satellites
Yesterday, the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced that it will lend €300M (~$323M) to Luxembourg-based SES to finance a trio of broadcast satellites that will serve Western Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. It’s the largest investment the EU’s investing arm has made to date into a Luxembourg-based company. ESA head Josef Aschbacher has repeatedly…
