By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: MDA Space buys Blue Canyon Technologies, Exolaunch is sold to a private equity firm, Chinese students develop asteroid flyby mission and more.
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Top Stories
MDA Space is buying smallsat manufacturer Blue Canyon Technologies. MDA Space announced Friday morning it reached an agreement to acquire Blue Canyon for $620 million from Raytheon. The transaction is expected to close by the end of year, subject to regulatory approvals. Blue Canyon produces small satellites and components and was a standalone company before being acquired by Raytheon in 2020. MDA Space, based in Canada, said the acquisition will give it more access to U.S. market opportunities. [MDA Space]
Exolaunch, a company that has arranged the launches of hundreds of satellites on rideshare missions, is being bought by a private equity company. EQT announced Thursday it will acquire Exolaunch for an undisclosed sum. Exolaunch arranges launches of satellites as rideshare payloads, particularly on SpaceX's Transporter and Bandwagon missions, and also develops satellite deployment systems. Exolaunch says the deal will give it resources to scale up, including acquiring dedicated launch capacity. The company announced last month it purchased two Falcon 9 launches for dedicated rideshare missions, and is looking at similar opportunities with other launch operators. [SpaceNews]
The director of the Space Force's rapid acquisition office has moved to another post. Kelly Hammett, the former head of the Space Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), was named Thursday executive director of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. Space RCO appears close to being shuttered as a standalone organization under the Space Force's acquisition overhaul, and House and Senate defense authorization bills would eliminate the office's separate statutory status. Space RCO was established in 2018 amid concern that traditional Pentagon acquisition programs were struggling to keep pace with technological advances and emerging threats from China and Russia. The office was created as an independent organization and was allowed to operate outside the processes that govern larger acquisition programs. [SpaceNews]
NASA has selected a space science mission for development. NASA announced Thursday the Dynamic Atmosphere-Ionosphere Explorer, or DAPHNE, mission will proceed into the next phase of development, with a launch planned for no earlier than 2029. DAPHNE will fly two identical satellites with instruments to study conditions in the thermosphere, allowing scientists to examine the interaction of space weather with Earth's atmosphere. The mission, led by the University of Colorado, has a cost cap of $250 million. NASA's heliophysics division recently announced a change in strategy, shifting toward more applied science applications. [SpaceNews]
A Chinese university is planning a mission to the asteroid Apophis as it makes a close approach to Earth in 2029. The Student-led Threatening Asteroid Reconnaissance of Tsinghua, or START, mission is a low-cost smallsat led by a team of more than 20 undergraduate students at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The spacecraft will maneuver to a high Earth orbit to allow it to make a high-speed flyby of Apophis when the asteroid flies very close to the Earth in April 2029. The payload suite includes narrow and wide-field cameras plus dual visible-to-near-infrared hyperspectral imagers, aimed at achieving a peak resolution of 8 centimeters per pixel. [SpaceNews]
Chinese startup Spark Space has raised funding for the world's largest rocket using engines with electric pumps. The company is developing the Jinhua-1, or Evolution-1, rocket, powered by its Lieyan-2 electric-pump-fed engine. The startup announced a Pre-A round of nearly 100 million yuan ($14.8 million) at the beginning of June and later said it raised tens of millions of yuan in additional funding. Spark Space said it successfully tested in March the Lieyan-2 engine, which produces 10 tons of thrust, about four times that of Rocket Lab's Rutherford engine that also uses electric pumps. [SpaceNews]
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Other News
SpaceX launched a National Reconnaissance Office mission early today. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 4:50 a.m. Eastern on the NROL-179 mission. The NRO later said this was the 14th launch of its "multi-phenomenology proliferated architecture" of hundreds of satellites, and third this year. [Spaceflight Now]
Austrian satellite propulsion startup Gate Space has raised funding from an accelerator program backed by the European Commission. The company said Friday it won 6.3 million euros ($7.2 million) in funding from the European Innovation Council Accelerator program. It was the only space company out of 38 selected in the latest round of that program. Gate Space said the funding will accelerate the industrialization of chemical propulsion technology it is developing. That system will be tested in space next year on BeaconSat, Austria's first military satellite. [SpaceNews]
Boeing demonstrated a key quantum networking protocol in ground testing of a compact payload ahead of on-orbit experiment in 2027. The company said it tested "high-fidelity entanglement swapping," which relies on teleportation to extend links between entangled photon pairs and is a core building block of quantum networks. That system will be tested in space on Q4S, a satellite Boeing is self-funding to test quantum communications technologies. [SpaceNews]
A startup is working to provide parabolic flight services. Mu-g Technologies recently took delivery of a Dassault Falcon 50 business jet it plans to use to fly research and technology demonstration payloads, providing brief periods of microgravity as the aircraft flies parabolic arcs. The company is looking to fill a gap in such services after Zero-G Corporation's Boeing 727 stopped flying last year. Mu-g hopes to begin commercial flights in the next six months, a timeline dependent on securing FAA certification. NASA recently announced it would acquire a Boeing 737 for reduced gravity flights, but Mu-g said its flights should complement, rather than compete, with the NASA flights. [SpaceNews]
NASA awarded commercial satellite data contracts to 14 companies Thursday. The awards are part of NASA's Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition program, where NASA buys Earth science imagery and other data from companies for use by NASA-supported researchers. The 14 companies include six who had previous contracts in the program and eight new providers. [NASA]
SpaceX offered formal criticism of proposed European satellite spectrum plans. Those plans, announced last month by the European Commission, would reserve two-thirds of the two-gigahertz spectrum band to providers within the EU, with the remaining third available to companies based outside the EU. SpaceX complained the proposal would split the spectrum into "virtually unusable sub-divided parts" and warned that it could interfere with Starlink services provided in Ukraine. [Bloomberg]
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In High Demand
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"One of the things that I tell launch providers every time I meet with them is that every kilogram of upmass you can make available will be sold. It will be many years before this demand is saturated, so every vehicle you can bring to market, every way that you can increase your cadence, that will be sold."
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– Robert Sproles, CEO of Exolaunch, on the supply-constrained launch market.
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FROM SPACENEWS |
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Join us for our next conversation on Golden Dome: Much of the Golden Dome system will depend on space-based and ground-based sensors — an evolving network meant to detect launches, follow hypersonic weapons and monitor activity across Earth and orbit. On June 25, join us as leaders from Arcfield, L3Harris and LeoLabs discuss these technologies, what’s necessary to make them operate at a high level and what possibilities could be in the works for the satellites involved. Register now. |
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