Moonshot #16

Qosmosys raises $100 million in seed funding, Urban Sky takes stratospheric ballooning to the next level, Blue Origin shows off Mark 1, and everything else happening in commercial space

Hello Continuum readers and Celestial Citizens,

Welcome back to Moonshot where we will give a bi-weekly rundown of all the private sector space news. If you haven’t already, consider becoming a paid subscriber ($6/month) so you can get past that pesky paywall and read the full Moonshot post!

A stratospheric Earth imaging balloon prepares for a flight above the American West. Credit: Urban Sky

Urban Sky – Denver startup Urban Sky got more than they bargained for last week – in the best possible way. Announced October 16th, the stratospheric balloon producers raised $9.75 million in an oversubscribed funding round. What’s in a balloon, you might ask? Urban Sky’s “microballoons” capture high-resolution, visible and long-wave infrared images for their homeland Colorado, with clients in environmental monitoring, property insurance and – ope, there it is – the oil and gas industry. With this new funding, Urban Sky plans to expand beyond Colorado, and fly their world watcher more often than their current rate of once per week. When asked if they’re like the Chinese spy balloon, Urban Sky clarifies that the technologies are different, but then again, the comparison has “made the business easier to communicate to people who are not familiar with ballooning.”    

Qosmosys – Singapore-based Qosmosys has entered the lunar lander chat, and they’re coming in swinging. Setting a new industry record for seed funding, Qosmosys raised $100 million to develop their lander and rover spacecraft, ZeusX. If you are wondering about this record investing strategy, keep wondering; the company has only disclosed that it has a “unique and protective funding model.” According to the company, the first two flight models will launch in 2027 and 2029, respectively. TechCrunch adds that the company has Helium-3 and other lunar mineral mining central to its business model.

ULA – All United Launch Alliance wants for Christmas is… a successful launch of the Vulcan Centaur. It appears Cape Canaveral will be working this Christmas Eve, as ULA sets December 24th as its long-awaited launch date for Astrobotic’s Peregrine moon lander. The Peregrine has been waiting patiently on its perch (sorry, had to) in Pittsburgh since January, while the Vulcan – and its Blue Origin engines – has suffered delay after delay. We all remember April’s explosion-gate, which set production back by a couple quarters.  According to ULA chief executive Tony Bruno, the team will be able to complete the testing and delivery of the rocket over the course of the next month to be ready for the December launch window, though the company does have a backup date in “January.” That said, we’re going to go out on a limb and say Astrobotic is hoping to avoid any more backup dates, or in their words: “We’ve been talking about doing this for 16 years. This is the moment.” If this was too much Christmas-talk for you, here’s something a bit more fitting for the creepy season: the rocket will also deliver a payload for Celestis, a “space memorial company.” We’ll let you look that one up. 

A comparison of Bezos’ Blue Moon lander design between 2019 (left) and now (right). Credit: Blue Origin

Blue Origin – Earlier this month, Blue Origin announced plans for the Blue Ring, an orbital transfer vehicle, which hopes to deliver upwards of 3,000 kilograms-worth of spacecraft or hosted payloads to LEO, MEO, cislunar space and beyond. Though this is the first official announcement of something the Bezos-owned company has been hinting at for months, it did not include timeline or cost estimates. Blue has also pushed back against whisperings of the company moving away from their LEO station initiative, the Orbital Reef, clarifying that they’re still hard at work with this NASA contract. In other news, apparently bygones are bygones when it comes to the NASA-Blue Origin human landing system drama, as Bezos and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson met up in Huntsville this past week to ogle the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander mock-up. The unveiling comes a couple years after Blue Origin filed a lawsuit in protest of NASA’s selection of SpaceX to deliver a human landing system, the suit’s subsequent dismissal and Blue Origin’s eventual (and successful) retry for a contract. Now, Bezos’ company holds responsibility for Artemis V, scheduled for approximately 2029. While Mark 1 is solely a cargo lander – designed to prove the spacecraft’s reliability to NASA – Mark 2 will be set up to ferry astronauts between a lunar orbiter and the surface of the Moon.

Machina Labs – LA startup Machina Labs is getting into the satellite and hypersonic vehicle game, expanding beyond their existing work with NASA, the Air Force Research Laboratory and SpaceX. That trio of clients is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but Machina Labs has even higher hopes for their robotics and artificial intelligence technology. In a process called “roboforming,” for instance, the Los Angeles company is able to offer faster and more cost effective manufacturing for propellant tanks. Their tech would also give manufacturers the ability to process materials that are often too tough to work with – such as titanium and Inconel – though they’re necessary for hypersonic vehicles to withstand the heat of reentry. 

Danti – Back in July, we made the prediction that one day, the space world will be using the phrase “just Danti it.” You may not have asked, but the answer is yes, we are going to die on this hill. Perhaps we’re not there yet, but in an important development this month, the Atlanta-based AI search engine startup landed a $1.2 million contract with the U.S. Space Force. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 award will allow Danti to present military analysts with a geospatial search engine that can “easily search and discover imagery, analytics, reports, news, social media and many other diverse data types,” according to founder Jesse Kallman. We can’t help but think about the other recent Space Force announcement regarding the co-opting of commercial satellites in case of national emergency. With endless eyes in the sky – and soon the ability to quickly search for a specific target – the U.S. Space Force is looking pretty dang powerful.