Plus: Fund raising for a Starship lookalike
By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: York Space to acquire antenna company All.Space, Chinese startup raises funding for a Starship lookalike, Falcon Heavy launches the third and final ViaSat-3 satellite, and more.
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Top Stories
York Space Systems will acquire satellite terminal manufacturer All.Space in a $355 million deal. The companies announced the deal Thursday, set to close in the third quarter. York will pay $155 million in cash and up to 5.9 million shares of York stock to acquire All.Space. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in the United Kingdom, All.Space makes multi-orbit, multi-band communications terminals designed to connect across multiple Earth orbits. The planned acquisition is York's second since it went public earlier this year. In March, the company acquired Orbion Space Technology, a supplier of satellite propulsion systems. It is part of a strategy of expanding across the satellite communications value chain. [SpaceNews]
Chinese launch startup Cosmoleap raised $73 million for work on a Starship-like rocket. Cosmoleap, whose full name is Beijing Dahang Yueqian Technology Co., Ltd., said it raised the funding from several investors to support development of the Yueqian-1 rocket and what it describes as China's first "tower catch and landing recovery" rocket system. The tower recovery system resembles the SpaceX Mechzilla tower system with "chopstick" arms. Cosmoleap says final assembly and testing of the Yueqian-1 rocket, capable of placing up to 18,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit, will begin in the second half of 2026, with the debut flight planned for 2027. [SpaceNews]
While air leaks in a Russian space station module have stopped, the cause of the cracks in that module remains unresolved. At a meeting Wednesday of the International Space Station Advisory Council, the committee said engineers at NASA and Roscosmos have yet to find the root cause of the small cracks seen in PrK, a vestibule of the Zvezda module. Those cracks had been linked to a small but persistent air leak there over several years, although that leak stopped in recent months after cosmonauts applied sealant to the cracks. While the leaks have stopped, crews take precautions such as limiting the time the vestibule, which links a docking port to the rest of the station, is pressurized. The committee said NASA and Roscosmos still don't agree on the severity of the cracking. [SpaceNews]
Planet is developing a new version of its Tanager spacecraft with enhanced capability to detect and monitor methane and trace-gas emissions. The company announced Thursday a version of Tanager that will fly a shortwave infrared instrument rather than a hyperspectral imager. Planet will produce SWIR Tanager with the nonprofit environmental-monitoring organization Carbon Mapper and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designs and builds Tanager imaging spectrometers. SWIR Tanager will gather 30-meter-resolution imagery in 100-kilometer swaths, optimized for the spectral bands for atmospheric gas detection. [SpaceNews]
The Space Rapid Capabilities Office selected three companies to develop counter-surveillance sensors. The office, a specialized acquisition arm within the United States Space Force focused on rapidly fielding space systems, said Wednesday it awarded contracts worth $3 million each to Assurance Technology Corp., Raptor Dynamix and Innovative Signal Analysis. The contracts will cover development of payloads that can be installed on satellites in geosynchronous orbit to detect and characterize emissions from ground-based radars. That would allow the satellites to know when they are being tracked and targeted. [SpaceNews]
The Canadian Space Agency has terminated a contract it awarded last year to Spire for a series of wildfire-monitoring satellites. Spire said in a regulatory filing last week that CSA terminated for convenience a contract worth 72 million Canadian dollars ($52.7 million) for WildFireSat, a set of 10 cubesats equipped with sensors to detect wildfires. Neither Spire nor CSA disclosed why the contract was canceled, although Spire executives said in an earnings call in March that work on the contract was paused while it discussed timing and requirements with the agency. CSA said it planned to continue work on WildFireSat with other Canadian government agencies and would soon engage with industry on revised plans. [SpaceNews]
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Other News
The first Falcon Heavy mission in 18 months successfully launched the third and final ViaSat-3 satellite Wednesday. The Falcon Heavy lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center at 10:13 a.m. Eastern, deploying the ViaSat-3 F3 spacecraft into a geostationary transfer orbit nearly five hours later. Viasat expects F3 to enter commercial service late this summer over the Asia Pacific, following extensive health checks on the operator's payload and spacecraft bus from Boeing. This satellite uses a different large deployable antenna than the one used on the first two ViaSat-3 spacecraft. The antenna on the first failed to deploy properly, depriving it of more than 90% of its capacity, while the antenna on the second satellite is in the process of deployment. This was the first Falcon Heavy mission since October 2024, when it launched NASA's Europa Clipper mission, although additional Falcon Heavy launches are planned for this year. [SpaceNews]
SpaceX also launched more Starlink satellites from California. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:42 p.m. Eastern, putting 24 Starlink satellites into orbit. This was the 52nd launch this year by SpaceX, 42 of which carried Starlink satellites. [Spaceflight Now]
A Falcon 9 upper stage that launched a pair of lunar landers last year will make its own crash landing on the moon in August. Astronomers tracking the upper stage, which launched Firefly's Blue Ghost 1 and ispace's Hakuto-R Resilience landers in January 2025, said the upper stage is on a trajectory to collide with the moon Aug. 5. The stage is expected to hit near Einstein crater on the western limb of the moon, but the impact is unlikely to be visible from the Earth as it will take place while the region is in sunlight. [SpaceNews]
Morocco is the latest country to join the Artemis Accords. Nasser Bourita, Morocco’s foreign minister, signed the Accords in a ceremony in the capital of Rabat attended by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and the U.S. ambassador to Morocco. Morocco is the 64th country to sign the Accords and the third to do so in the last 10 days. One former agency official attributed the surge in signings to the recent Artemis 2 mission. [SpaceNews]
L3Harris has confidentially filed plans to take its missile unit public. The confidential filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission allows the company to work with regulators before making the registration statement public. L3Harris said earlier this year it would spin off the missile unit into a standalone publicly traded company, part of a deal that included a $1 billion investment from the Pentagon. [Reuters]
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FROM SPACENEWS |
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Attack of the Killer Regolith
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"Our number one enemy on the moon is not China, it's regolith. I don't know what the Chinese are going to do, but I know the regolith is going to attack us, and attack us viciously."
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– Mike Gold, president of Redwire Space, discussing the challenges posed by lunar regolith at the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium spring meeting Wednesday.
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