 | Top Stories
In-space transportation company Impulse Space has raised $150 million. The company announced the Series B round Tuesday led by Founders Fund with participation from several returning and new investors, such as Lux Capital, Spring Tide and DCVC. Impulse said the funding will allow it to move ahead with work on two orbital transfer vehicles, Mira and Helios. The company launched its first Mira last November and is working on an upgraded version while developing the more powerful Helios vehicle designed to transport large satellites from LEO to GEO within a day. [SpaceNews]
Satellite operator Yahsat completed its merger with geospatial AI company Bayanat Tuesday. The merged company, called Space42, started trading Tuesday on the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange with a value of about $3 billion. Led by Karim Sabbagh, a former CEO of multi-orbit satellite operator SES, Space42 aims to develop hybrid connectivity and geospatial services to meet demand from autonomous vehicles and other emerging capabilities. Space42 has around 700 employees across more than 150 countries, with around two-thirds coming from the legacy Yahsat business now operating as a division called Space Services. [SpaceNews]
The sale of Dish Network will allow EchoStar to focus on terrestrial and satellite broadband. The sale of Dish to DirecTV, announced Monday, will free EchoStar of about $10 billion of debt, and the company also announced about $5.5 billion in new capital for its remaining business. While EchoStar plans to focus on expanding its terrestrial wireless network in the U.S., it also sees new opportunities in direct-to-device satellite services. EchoStar expects to work with partners to develop any direct-to-device satellite constellation given its high costs. [SpaceNews]
China is providing stiff competition to the United States in the commercial remote sensing market. A study released Tuesday at a CSIS event used an Olympic medal-like ranking of top players in the Earth observation market. Chinese companies secured 14 medals compared to 12 by American companies and nine by those in the rest of the world. The report raises high-level questions about the future of U.S. leadership in commercial remote sensing, noting that while the U.S. excels in radar and hyperspectral imaging, China is leading or rapidly advancing in other sectors. [SpaceNews]
The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) is seeking proposals to advance small satellite propulsion technologies. The DIU is specifically interested in electrospray thrusters, which generate thrust by accelerating charged particles and promise high fuel efficiency and precise control. The DoD's interest in electrospray thrusters reflects the need for more versatile and fuel-efficient spacecraft, especially as the U.S. military increasingly relies on smaller satellites for communications and intelligence purposes. [SpaceNews]
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| Other News
Commercial space station developers want more opportunities to send precursor missions to the International Space Station. NASA has awarded four private astronaut missions, or PAMs, so far, allowing commercial crewed spacecraft to make short-duration visits to the station. Both Axiom Space, which has won all four PAMs to date and flown three of them, and Vast Space said at a recent panel they want NASA to offer more opportunities for such missions, helping them gain experience and demonstrate markets for their later commercial stations. NASA had planned to allow two PAMs a year but the current rate is just one a year. [SpaceNews]
NASA astronaut Josh Cassada is retiring from the agency. NASA announced Tuesday that Cassada left the agency, but neither he nor the agency disclosed his future plans. Cassada flew a single mission, Crew-5 in 2022-23, spending nearly six months on the ISS and performing three spacewalks. [NASA]
Controllers have turned off an instrument on the Voyager 2 spacecraft as its power levels continue to decline. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Tuesday that it turned off the plasma science instrument to conserve power for the four other instruments still working on the 47-year-old spacecraft. The instrument measured the plasma environment around the spacecraft and helped scientists determine in 2018 that the spacecraft had left the heliosphere and was now in interstellar space. A similar instrument on Voyager 1 malfunctioned decades ago. Scientists hope to keep the spacecraft operating with at least one working instrument into the 2030s. [NASA/JPL]
Astronomers have discovered a "sub-Earth" exoplanet orbiting a nearby star. In a paper published Tuesday, astronomers announced the discovery of the planet orbiting Barnard's Star, a red dwarf six light-years away. The planet has a mass less than half of the Earth, making it one of the smallest exoplanets found to date. Astronomers cautioned that the planet orbits too close to Barnard's Star to be in the habitable zone. [Space.com]
| |  | Don't Drink to That
"This had one of the best names that we've seen, MAI TAI. They didn't serve us drinks in the lab. Safety will be happy about that."
– Michael Johns, chair of the NASA Advisory Council's technology committee, discussing at a meeting of the council on Tuesday a recent visit to a lab at the Glenn Research Center that hosts a project called Mitigating Arc Inception via Transformational Array Instrumentation, or MAI TAI.
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