Plus: Blue Origin's megaconstellation
| By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: Blue Origin joins the megaconstellation race, a testing setback for Rocket Lab's Electron, Elon Musk's push for a SpaceX IPO and more.
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| | | | | | Top Stories
Blue Origin plans to develop its own broadband constellation with more than 5,400 satellites. On Wednesday, the company announced TeraWave, a system with 5,280 satellites in low Earth orbit and 128 in medium Earth orbit, equipped with optical and radio-frequency communications links. TeraWave would provide up to six terabits per second of capacity for enterprise, data center and government customers, rather than for consumer markets. The company plans to cap the service at 100,000 customers. Blue Origin also said growing AI workloads and cloud-based services are driving demand for higher-capacity, more resilient links for data centers and other high-capacity users. The company said it expects to start launching TeraWave satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027, pending FCC approval. [SpaceNews]
Space logistics company D-Orbit has raised $128 million in the first closing of a Series D round. The funding, announced Thursday, will allow the Italian company to expand its in-orbit transportation services and build out its orbital logistics infrastructure. The company currently operates a series of ION tugs that fly on rideshare missions, deploying satellites. The funding will also support "further strategic acquisitions" that the company did not disclose. Italy-based Azimut Group is investing $53 million directly in D-Orbit in addition to buying out an existing D-Orbit investor as part of the round. [SpaceNews]
Rocket Lab suffered a testing setback during preparations for the first launch of its Neutron rocket. The company said late Wednesday that a first-stage propellant tank ruptured during pressure testing. Rocket Lab said it is evaluating the effect of the incident on the schedule for the first Neutron launch and will provide more details in an earnings call next month. Rocket Lab said last November it was pushing back the first launch of the medium-lift rocket into 2026 after previously working towards a launch by the end of 2025. The company said then it planned to have the first vehicle on the pad in the first quarter of 2026 with a launch some time thereafter. [SpaceNews]
The Exploration Company is in talks to acquire small launch vehicle company Orbex. The companies said Wednesday that they had signed a letter of intent to explore a potential acquisition, but did not disclose details, such as the value of the potential deal. The Exploration Company is developing Nyx, a line of spacecraft to provide cargo delivery services to and from low Earth orbit with plans for later lunar spacecraft as well as a crewed version of Nyx. Orbex has been working on Prime, but the schedule for its first launch has slipped by years and the company is reportedly struggling financially. The U.K. government provided only limited funding to Orbex in ESA's European Launcher Challenge, electing to leave most of its contribution to the program unallocated. ESA officials said earlier this month that the U.K. would need to allocate its funding before the agency could sign contracts with the five companies in the program. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | | Other News
SpaceX performed its first West Coast launch of Starlink satellites for 2026 overnight. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 12:47 a.m. Eastern, putting 29 Starlink satellites into orbit. The launch was the ninth Falcon 9 mission so far this year. [Spaceflight Now]
Elon Musk is reportedly seeking to take SpaceX public by July. The company plans to select bankers to lead its IPO in the near future as Musk pushes to take the company public, which could raise tens of billions of dollars for SpaceX and value the company at $1.5 trillion. Musk, who had long said he wanted to keep SpaceX private to avoid the issues he faced at publicly traded Tesla, changed his mind because of a desire to pursue orbital data centers for artificial intelligence. [Wall Street Journal]
The French government has selected Loft Orbital to build a radar imaging satellite. The contract issued by the French military acquisition agency DGA and the French space agency CNES covers a single demonstration satellite built by Loft Orbital, with a synthetic aperture radar payload provided by Thales Alenia Space and TEKEVER. The satellite could be the precursor for a French SAR constellation. The French military has relied on SAR imagery from a German system, SAR-Lupe, in exchange for optical imagery from French satellites. [Breaking Defense]
Several historical items will be flying to the moon on Artemis 2. The items carried inside the Orion spacecraft include a small swatch of fabric from the Wright Flyer aircraft built by the Wright Brothers. Also on board will be one American flag that flew on both the first and last shuttle missions, and stayed on the International Space Station until it was returned by the SpaceX Demo-2 mission, while another American flag was produced for the unflown Apollo 18 mission. [NASA]
| | | | | | | FROM SPACENEWS |  | | Managing an orbital economy as space grows more congested: In this episode of Space Minds, host David Ariosto talks with Chiara Manfletti, the CEO of Neuraspace and a professor of space mobility and propulsion at the Technical University of Munich. They discuss space debris, orbital logistics and managing a new orbital economy through new initiatives in Europe and around the world. Watch or listen now.
| | | | | | Hit the Space Floating
| "We want Crew-12 to hit the ground running, or hit the space floating. Something like that."
| | – NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, discussing at a press conference Wednesday how he and other members of the recently returned Crew-11 mission planned to brief the Crew-12 astronauts ahead of their launch to the ISS next month.
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