| By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: Xona raises $170 million for navigation satellites, ispace revises its lunar lander plans, criticism from industry and Congress on NASA's commercial space station strategy shift and more.
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| | | | | | Top Stories
Satellite navigation startup Xona Space Systems announced a $170 million Series C round Thursday. The round was led by Mohari Ventures Natural Capital, with participation from several other investors. The company said the money will support production at a new factory to accelerate deployment of its low Earth orbit constellation. Xona is building a commercial positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) service, known as Pulsar, designed to operate as an alternative or backup to GPS. Pulsar is designed to work with existing GPS devices, a shift enabled by Xona's decision to move from C- to L-band frequencies. Xona aims to deploy a constellation of 258 satellites within a few years, which it said could be built "for the cost of a single GPS satellite on orbit today." [SpaceNews]
Japanese company ispace is revamping its lunar lander plans while introducing a lunar satellite network. The company said Friday it was replacing an engine called VoidRunner that it has been jointly developing with Agile Space Industries for its landers in favor of a flight-proven engine from another, unnamed company. The company, which had separate lander designs from its Japanese and American business units, is combining them into a unified platform called Ultra. As a result of the change, it is delaying the first ispace U.S. lander, which it was building for Draper for a NASA mission, from 2027 to 2030. Japanese landers launching in 2028 and 2029 remain on schedule. ispace also announced it is developing Lunar Connect Service, a constellation of five satellites to provide communications, navigation and imaging services at the moon. The first satellite is scheduled to launch in 2027. [SpaceNews]
U.S. Space Command is beginning a phased move to Alabama over the next five years. Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, told lawmakers Thursday that the command plans to break ground on its new headquarters in Huntsville while starting near-term operations out of existing facilities at Redstone Arsenal. He said about 200 personnel are expected to be working from Redstone by the end of the year as construction on the permanent facility ramps up. That permanent headquarters is scheduled for completion in 2031. [SpaceNews]
Two U.S. surveillance satellites performed a "handoff" to keep tabs on two Chinese satellites. Observations by commercial space domain awareness provider COMSPOC show USA 324 and USA 325, a pair of U.S. Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites, coordinating maneuvers earlier this month in the vicinity of Shijian-29A and -29B. USA 324, which arrived near the Chinese satellites in March, took over for USA 325, which had been in the vicinity since January and is now drifting away. The Shijian-29 pair, part of a broad, experimental and often classified series of satellites, were launched towards GEO in late December 2025. The capabilities and operational role of Shijian-29A and 29B remain unclear. [SpaceNews]
NASA's proposed changes to its transition plan from the International Space Station to commercial stations were criticized at a House hearing this week. At the hearing by the House Science Committee's space subcommittee, Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, said the proposal by NASA earlier this week to develop a core module for a commercial station that would initially dock with ISS was "sowing concern and, really, sowing confusion" among commercial station developers. NASA argued its proposal is needed because of the slow development of commercial markets but Cavossa said those markets are quite strong. Rep. George Whitesides (D-Calif.) also criticized the NASA plan, raising questions about its cost and schedule while maintaining ISS operations and keeping a planned 2030 retirement date for the ISS. [SpaceNews]
Spanish company Satlantis is seeing growth through the development and operations of small satellites. The company reported revenues of 47.8 million euros ($56.4 million) in 2025, with more than 50% coming from smallsats. Satlantis acquires spacecraft from Kongsberg NanoAvionics, OHB Sweden, Creotech of Poland and other suppliers, and integrates high-resolution optical payloads on them. In 2025, Satlantis announced plans for five FlexSat Earth observation microsatellites. The first is scheduled to launch in late 2026. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | | Other News
SpaceX launched more Starlink satellites from California on Thursday. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:03 p.m. Eastern, placing 25 Starlink satellites into orbit. The launch was originally scheduled for Tuesday but delayed for undisclosed reasons. [Spaceflight Now]
China launched an experimental satellite Friday. A Long March-2C equipped with a Yuanzheng-1S upper stage lifted off at 12:11 a.m. Eastern from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. It placed into orbit Shiyan-33, which Chinese officials described only as a test satellite. [Xinhua]
Hughes Network Systems is positioning its defense business to capture growing demand from governments. The company said it is seeing interest from governments seeking greater control over how satellite communications networks are used. Hughes offers software that sits in terminals at the edge of communications networks and manages how data moves across satellite, 5G and terrestrial links. That gives governments some degree of sovereign capabilities by controlling how satellites are used even without owning the satellites themselves. [SpaceNews]
While demand for space services grows, turning that into profits remains a challenge. During a Satellite 2026 panel this week, industry officials noted optimism about existing and emerging markets, from remote sensing to direct-to-device communications and microgravity manufacturing. Despite the optimism, panelists pointed to several bottlenecks that could limit the industry's ability to capitalize on growing demand, such as supply chain constraints. It is also unclear whether countries such as the United States have enough space manufacturing capacity to meet rising demand amid growing economic nationalism and pressure to localize supply chains. [SpaceNews]
Some companies see challenges in the growing use of commercial procurement models by governments for space services. At a Satellite 2026 panel Thursday, executives said that government agencies, particularly in national security, are looking for exquisite capabilities for which there are no other customers. However, those agencies want to buy them off a production line at a commercial price. Governments can help stimulate commercial demand for those services in some cases, they noted, although in others the capabilities will likely remain limited to government use. [SpaceNews]
Canadian startup SBQuantum plans to send a quantum diamond magnetometer into orbit on a Spire Global satellite. Spire is providing the satellite, ground stations and data processing for SBQuantum's magnetometer, developed for final phase of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) MagQuest competition. Through MagQuest, NGA seeks to identify promising technologies capable of providing data for future World Magnetic Models, which underpin navigation systems. The satellite is scheduled to launch next week on a SpaceX rideshare mission. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | | | FROM SPACENEWS |  | | March 31 at 1 p.m. ET: Join SpaceNews and Star Catcher, in partnership with the Commercial Space Federation, for a conversation on the energy and computing needs driving the push toward orbital data centers, where there are gaps and where there are opportunities and what comes next in this fast-moving field. Register now. | | | | | | New AI Use Case
| "It is a mission called FALCON. We really, really need to employ AI to do our mission acronyms. This is really tortured."
| | – Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, discussing a new Earth science mission called FALCON, or Fleet for the Atmosphere Linking Commercial Observations with NASA, at a symposium Thursday by the Universities Space Research Association and Space Policy Institute.
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