By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: EnduroSat raises a big round and signs a big contract, Space Force lets SpaceX take the lead in designing a new constellation, China conducts four launches in 48 hours, and more.
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Top Stories
Bulgarian satellite manufacturer EnduroSat has raised $205 million to ramp up production in Europe and the United States. The company announced Wednesday it closed a funding round led by Riot Ventures and Atreides Management that valued the company at more than $1 billion. The extra funds will help establish a new high-volume manufacturing facility in the United States, where it announced an order from navigation startup TrustPoint last week for 40 low Earth orbit satellites. Also central to the raise are plans announced last month with Bulgaria's government for a space and defense hub at a former military airbase near Sofia featuring a production line designed to produce two 200- to 500-kilogram satellites a day. The company, once known for just cubesats, is looking to move beyond the 500-kilogram class with FRAME Max, designed for spacecraft weighing between one and five tons for orbital computing and other power-intensive applications. [SpaceNews]
EnduroSat is also teaming with CACI to build two dozen imaging satellites for Vantor. The contract, announced Thursday, is for Pulse, a constellation that will use 40-centimeter-class imaging satellites to provide more frequent coverage than Vantor's existing high-resolution spacecraft. EnduroSat will supply the satellite buses and handle spacecraft integration, while CACI will provide the optical imaging payloads. Payload integration and testing will take place in the United States, and Vantor said the satellites are expected to deploy between 2027 and 2029. Pulse satellites will monitor broad areas for changes and then cue higher-resolution satellites to collect more detailed imagery. [SpaceNews]
Impulse Space added $308 million to its recent Series D round. The company said Wednesday it extended that $500 million round, announced in June, with several existing investors participating. The additional money will help Impulse Space scale its team and work on new product development. The company has flown three of its Mira maneuverable spacecraft, two of which recently completed proximity operations that saw them come within 200 meters of each other. A fourth Mira is scheduled to launch next month, while the company works on its larger Helios kick stage for a 2027 first flight. [SpaceNews]
The Space Force will wait for ULA's Vulcan to resume commercial launches before using it for national security missions. A Space Force official said ULA will resume commercial operations, starting with an upcoming launch for Amazon Leo, while the Space Force continues its own review under the National Security Space Launch program, or NSSL, which buys launches for the military and intelligence community. Vulcan has not flown since February when one of its solid rocket boosters suffered an in-flight anomaly, although the mission was still a success. The pause has prompted the Space Force to examine how it can rearrange its launch schedule rather than wait for Vulcan to return, including potentially swapping missions between vehicles. [SpaceNews]
The Space Force is deferring the design of a new satellite network to SpaceX. Rather than set specific spacecraft requirements for the Space Data Network Backbone (SDN-B) constellation, the service instead set constellation-level requirements for coverage, capacity, number of users and data throughput, allowing SpaceX to decide how to best achieve those requirements. SpaceX won the $2.29 billion contract for the SDN-B system in May. The Space Force describes the network as a foundational data backhaul layer providing high-capacity, low-latency communications. [SpaceNews]
L3Harris is turning a missile-tracking prototype satellite developed for the Missile Defense Agency into a production spacecraft for Golden Dome. The company in July received a $955 million Space Development Agency contract for 18 Accelerated Missile Defense Tranche 3, or AMDT3, satellites, which will carry sensors designed to produce precise tracking data needed to support missile intercepts. The spacecraft are closely based on the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor, or HBTSS, prototype that L3Harris launched in 2024 and subsequently tested on orbit. SDA tied the AMDT3 procurement to Golden Dome when it announced the contracts in July. [SpaceNews]
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Other News
China conducted two launches about two hours apart Wednesday evening. A Long March 12 rocket lifted off at 8:32 p.m. Eastern from the Hainan commercial space launch center. It placed nine satellites into orbit for the Guowang constellation into orbits at an inclination of 50 degrees. A Kuaizhou-11 lifted off at 10:40 p.m. Eastern from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, putting into orbit Tianyi-51 and Tianyi-52, spacecraft developed by Chinese company Spacety to perform interferometric synthetic aperture radar imaging from mid-inclination orbits. The launches were part of four conducted by China within 48 hours. [SpaceNews]
Russia launched a Progress cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station on Wednesday. A Soyuz-2.1b lifted off at 9:33 a.m. Eastern and placed the Progress MS-35 spacecraft into orbit. The spacecraft, carrying about three tons of cargo, will dock with the station on Saturday. The launch was scheduled for last week but delayed, reportedly because of problems with the rocket's third stage. NASA separately announced Wednesday that the next crewed mission to the ISS, Crew-13, will now launch in early October. Crew-13 was scheduled to launch in mid-September but was delayed to correct a leak in an oxidizer line in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. [Space.com | NASA]
A Falcon 9 launched a classified Space Force mission Wednesday night. The Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 9:07 p.m. Eastern after a one-day delay. Neither SpaceX nor the Space Force disclosed details about the payload on the Falcon 9 for this mission, designated USSF-259. It followed two similar Space Force Falcon 9 missions launched in mid-August and last week, with another expected in late September. [Spaceflight Now]
Rocket Lab says its acquisition of satellite operator Iridium remains on track. The company said Tuesday it completed financing for the $8 billion deal announced in June and is now working on regulatory issues before closing the deal. Rocket Lab previously said it expected the acquisition to close by mid-2027 but company CFO Adam Spice said at World Space Business Week earlier this week that it could be done sooner. Spice said Rocket Lab sees growth opportunities for using Iridium's existing constellation for navigation services as well as direct-to-device applications that comply with the 3GPP standard. [SpaceNews]
Intuitive Machines wants to leverage its GEO satellite manufacturing capabilities for orbital data centers. Company executives said at World Space Business Week that they are studying how to transfer existing capabilities to build large GEO satellites, obtained when Intuitive Machines acquired Lanteris Space Systems, to orbital data center satellites. Doing so would also require "industrial-scale" production, shifting from a handful of satellites built for GEO customers to potentially hundreds for orbital data center customers. The company currently builds spacecraft that produce about 30 kilowatts of power and sees a path to scale them to spacecraft with 100 kilowatts or more. [SpaceNews]
Scientists have discovered a large new crater on the moon. The crater, 222 meters across and 43 meters deep, was created some time between April 11 and May 22 of 2024 based on images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The crater was likely caused by an impact of an asteroid the size of a small building. Such an impact should happen on the moon less than once a century. Scientists named the crater McGetchin after the late Thomas McGetchin, a former director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. [AP]
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Don't Give Them Any Ideas
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"Starship is not a representative threat of a North Korean ICBM."
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– Chris Kemp, CEO of Astra, discussing at World Space Business Week on Wednesday markets suited for small launch vehicles, including serving as targets for testing missile defense systems.
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FROM SPACENEWS |
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