| By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: Aalyria raises $100 million, top officials say the Space Force should be bigger, AST SpaceMobile wins a SDA contract and more. If someone forwarded you this edition, sign up to receive it directly in your inbox every weekday. Have thoughts or feedback? You can hit reply to let me know directly.
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Aalyria has become the latest space unicorn with a $100 million funding round. The company, which is developing laser terminals and software for dynamically routing data across space, air and ground networks, announced the funding round Monday, giving the company a valuation of $1.3 billion. Aalyria, spun out of Google's parent Alphabet four years ago, says its Spacetime platform can coordinate those links in real time, allocating capacity and routing traffic as satellites, aircraft and ground terminals move. Telesat's Lightspeed constellation will be the first commercial customer of Spacetime. Alongside Spacetime, the company said the funds will help expand deployment of its Tightbeam laser terminals, which also stem in part from Alphabet-era research. [SpaceNews]
The Secretary of the Air Force and chief of the Space Force said the service needs to be bigger. Speaking Monday at the Air & Space Forces Association's Warfare Symposium, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the Space Force is preparing for a period of sustained expansion as its mission set broadens and its workload increases. That will require more personnel and a more specialized workforce, he said. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman, speaking after Meink, noted the Space Force's 15,000 personnel need to support a joint force of about 1.3 million service members. Because of its lean structure, Saltzman said, the service has limited surge capacity. [SpaceNews]
The Space Force is seeking industry input on concepts for in-space refueling. A request for information (RFI) released earlier this month asks for "technical concepts and approaches to refueling services for prepared clients in orbit," with an expectation that solutions could be operational by 2030. The RFI suggests the Space Force is looking beyond demonstration missions toward a broader architecture. Industry officials, including those developing satellite refueling technologies, said they welcomed the release of the RFI. [SpaceNews]
AST SpaceMobile won a Space Development Agency contract for a broadband demonstration. The $30 million contract, announced Monday, is part of SDA's Hybrid Acquisition for Proliferated Low Earth Orbit, or HALO, an Other Transaction Agreement designed to fund rapid on-orbit experiments. Under the contract, AST SpaceMobile will use its BlueBird satellite constellation, intended to provide direct-to-device broadband services to smartphones, to test resilient, low-latency tactical satellite communications, including to existing tactical military radios. For AST SpaceMobile, the new contract represents another step toward positioning a consumer-focused broadband system as relevant to defense missions, after receiving a $43 million contract last year to support SDA through an undisclosed prime contractor. [SpaceNews]
Sophia Space raised $10 million in seed funding to accelerate development of space-based edge computers and orbital data centers. The seed round, announced Tuesday, was led by Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund and Unlock Venture Partners. With the funds, Sophia Space will accelerate development of its orbital computing systems and proprietary thermal technology. The company is working on Tile, a compute module measuring one meter by one meter by one centimeter that contains servers, solar arrays and a passive cooling system. [SpaceNews]
Boeing has tested an artificial intelligence large language model that can operate on space-grade hardware. In recent ground tests, Boeing engineers demonstrated that a large language model running on commercial off-the-shelf hardware could examine telemetry and report in natural language on the health of a satellite. This technology would allow controllers to check a satellite's status without downloading and analyzing telemetry, as the AI model would do that work on the satellite instead. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | | Other News
NASA has pushed back the rollback of Artemis 2 by a day. NASA said that poor weather would delay the return of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft from Launch Complex 39B to the Vehicle Assembly Building from Tuesday to Wednesday. NASA is rolling back the Artemis 2 stack to perform repairs on the helium pressurization system of the SLS upper stage after problems with it were discovered at the end of last week. [NASA]
A Dragon cargo spacecraft is set to return to Earth this week after an extended stay on the International Space Station. NASA said that the CRS-33 Dragon spacecraft will undock from the station Thursday, splashing down late Thursday night off the California coast. The Dragon has been at the station since August and will return with science experiments from the station. While Dragon cargo missions usually spend about a month at the ISS, this mission stayed much longer to demonstrate the spacecraft's ability to reboost the station's orbit. [NASA]
A Japanese company is delaying the launch of a small rocket. Space One said it was postponing the launch of its third Kairos rocket, which had been scheduled for this week, citing poor weather at its launch site. The company said the launch would be rescheduled for some time in March but did not give a more precise date. This will be the third flight of Kairos, a small solid-fuel rocket. The first two launches failed to reach orbit. [Jiji Press]
LambdaVision, a company that produces artificial retinas in microgravity, has booked space on a commercial space station. The company said Tuesday it reserved payload space on Starlab, the commercial space station under development by the Starlab Space joint venture. LambdaVision has flown experiments on the ISS demonstrating the ability to create layers of thin protein films for its artificial retinas. The announcement came a day after Starlab Space announced it completed a commercial critical design review for the station. [SpaceNews]
Momentus will fly 10 payloads on its first mission in three years. The company said its Vigoride 7 spacecraft is slated to launch in late March on the SpaceX Transporter-16 rideshare mission. Vigoride 7 will fly payloads for NASA, DARPA, the Air Force Research Laboratory, SpaceWERX, Portal Space Systems, Orbit Fab, CisLunar Industries, DPhi Space and Solstar Space. [SpaceNews]
The Artemis 2 astronauts will attend tonight's State of the Union address. The astronauts will be guests of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who invited them to highlight the role his state plays in building the Space Launch System rocket at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The invitation was presumably made at the last minute, as the astronauts were supposed to be in a pre-flight quarantine for the Artemis 2 launch this week before NASA delayed the launch to fix a problem with the SLS upper stage. [Axios]
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| "I feel like, at this point, we have demonstrated a significant amount of improvement to where I am almost happy. I may not ever be happy, I don't know."
| | – John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis 2 mission management team, discussing at a briefing Friday the improved performance of that team during a second wet dress rehearsal last week. A day later, NASA announced the launch would be postponed to April because of a problem with the SLS upper stage.
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