Relativity Space signed a seven-year lease on a test stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi to prepare for its 3D-printed Terran R rocket. The company will pay $2.76M for the initial lease on the Apollo-era A-2 stand, and has the option to take out another 10 years if needed. Relativity already has 10-year […]
President Biden plans to nominate Michael G. Whitaker to be the new FAA chief, a position that has been open for more than 500 days. The nomination comes five months after Phillip Washington withdrew from consideration after congressional pushback over his limited aviation industry experience. The position has been vacant since March 2022, with Billy […]
Antaris is hoping to bring enterprise tech concepts to space—and now it has additional seed funding to try to make that a reality. Antaris, a SaaS platform for space, announced Wednesday that it raised $3.5M in seed funding. Streamlined Ventures, which specializes in early-stage investments, led the round, which brings Antaris’s total funding to $10M. […]
Turion is announcing a slew of wins in its efforts to design, build, and deploy its on-orbit mobility and debris removal infrastructure. The Irvine, CA-based space sustainability startup has notched six recent contracts from NASA, the Space Force, and the Air Force, each supporting a different area of its product stack. “We’re trying to grow […]
India’s space industry got an energizing shock from its lunar landing two weeks ago, and so far, the flurry of investment activity isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Manastu Space, an Indian collision avoidance and green propulsion startup, announced Tuesday that it closed a $3M pre-Series A led by Capital 2B, BIG Capital, and […]
Chinese rocket startup Galactic Energy launched its Ceres-1 solid rocket from a mobile sea platform yesterday, becoming China’s first commercial rocket to achieve the feat. The launch, which transported four IOT birds to LEO, took place off the coast of Haiyang in the Yellow Sea. Sea launcher: With this launch, China has now completed five […]
The process of moving the nation’s space traffic management mission from DoD to the Commerce Department has been slow—but Richard DalBello told Payload that’s very much on purpose. “There was an idea present when we started that somehow this would be simple,” DalBello, head of the Office of Space Commerce, said. “This is tremendously complicated…. […]
Wyvern, a two-year-old hyperspectral startup, is signing on to secure observation time on a Loft Orbital mission slated for next year to expand the capacity of its Dragonette constellation. Seeing colors Compared to optical sensors, which can collect data across three or four spectral bands—roughly red, blue, and green—hyperspectral sensors divide light into much narrower […]
MDA ($MDA) has been a longtime customer of SatixFy ($SATX). Now, it’s getting a piece of the company. SatixFy, a satellite communications company that is driven by its in-house chipsets, announced on Thursday it will sell its payload division to the Canadian space tech company for $60M. MDA will pay $40M to buy SatixFy Space […]
SatSure, an EO intelligence startup, secured a $15M Series A, the company announced Wednesday. The capital influx will be used to develop a fleet of four high-res and multispectral satellites, which are expected to launch in Q4 2025. Baring Private Equity Partners and Promus Ventures led the round, which consisted of a mix of equity […]
Maxar is getting ready to start pumping out 300 series buses for the Space Development Agency’s tracking mission, but a company exec says he sees a long future for the spacecraft with both commercial and national security customers beyond the military constellation. “There are a lot of studies and demo-type contracts within the LEO sphere […]
The DoD wants rockets on deck to launch at a moment’s notice. Firefly is rising to the challenge. The startup announced yesterday that it is officially on standby to launch the VICTUS NOX tactically responsive mission for US Space Systems Command (SSC). The Texas-based launcher and Millennium Space Systems, the payload provider for the mission, […]
