Moonshot #18
Starliner targets a spring 2024 launch, Rocket Lab expands its footprint, and Astra secures $2.7 million as long-term plans remain unclear.
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 or for a limited time $32.50/year) so you can get past that pesky paywall and read the full Moonshot post!
Boeing – After some flammable table and parachute problems put Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule behind schedule, the company’s star client NASA assured the public last week that the spacecraft should be ready for a spring 2024 launch. That being said, the new parachute “soft links” are scheduled to undergo a drop test in January, the results of which could affect the planned April 14th date. This Crew Flight Test (CFT) from Boeing endeavors to deliver NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS, to be the first crew capsule to return on land, and to be the first crewed launch from Cape Canaveral since Apollo 7 in 1968. Coming for that last title is SpaceX and Axiom, who are also considering Cape Canaveral for their crewed Ax-3 launch in January.
SpaceX – While Super Heavy Starship continues to explode its way to operation, SpaceX has no problem flying Starlink satellites without it. Falcon 9 rockets launched 23 satellites early on November 18th and 22 satellites on November 20th, from Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, respectively. The weeks ahead for the company will surely involve Starship corrections – the list of which SpaceX will produce for the FAA to approve – and perhaps answering to their questionable safety record, which some U.S. representatives are urging NASA to dig into after a chilling Reuters report earlier this month. There’s no denying that Starship holds promise for NASA’s Artemis program and future space travel in general – so long as it doesn’t, in the process, endanger the same humans it aspires to shelter. So sure in Starship’s positive fate is Mattel, who recently launched (yeah, yeah…pun intended) a Matchbox toy of the powerful reusable rocket. This begs the question: who will play Elon Musk in Greta Gerwig’s inevitable Mattel-sponsored film, Starship?
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Eutelsat OneWeb – A subsidiary of France’s Eutelsat Group, OneWeb now has regulatory clearance to operate satellite broadband services in India. Although its headquarters is in London, Eutelsat OneWeb is backed by Indian billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal, via his company Bharti Enterprises. Once again waiting in the wings for regulatory approval is SpaceX, who has yet to score the same clearance to operate Starlink services in India, and remains at odds with the nation’s other telecom giant Reliance Jio.
Amazon – Also interested in that sweet, sweet spectrum space in India is Amazon with their Kuiper constellation, which has now achieved 30 days of successful connection with two prototype satellites. With this successful start to Kuiper, the Starlink competitor feels confident in launching their first operational satellites in the second quarter of 2024. While an exact launch cadence is unclear at this stage, Amazon will need to launch at least half of their total Kuiper satellites by 2026 per FCC regulation.
Ursa Major – Though they originally adopted additive manufacturing (or 3D printing, for the cool kids) to produce liquid propellant engines, Colorado-based Ursa Major now plans to apply the technology to solid propulsion. Most commonly used in military products like missiles, solid rocket motors have been in higher demand since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and traditional production lines have struggled to keep up. Ursa Major is not the first company to use additive manufacturing in the solid propulsion – Albuquerque-based X-Bow has harnessed the practice to produce the solid propellant itself – but the company has already landed an “undisclosed U.S. government customer.”
Astra – Propulsion and launch vehicle producer Astra Space may live to see another day after investors granted the company a four-day extension on a bridge loan provided earlier this month. The extension – which took Astra as far as November 21st – was then followed by a $2.7 million raise, announced November 24th. The company continues to work on a long-term funding strategy, including the founders’ plans to take the company private. Although Astra reported a net loss of $29.7 million in their third quarter results, they noted that revenue from eight recent electric propulsion system deliveries would be reported in Q4. The company’s financial scramble began at the start of the month, when the company fell below a cash threshold and defaulted on a $12.5 million loan.
World View – Perhaps reading the writing on the (Astra) wall, stratospheric balloon company World View bails on long-held plans to go public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger with Leo Holdings. Although the November 17th statement claims the break-up was “mutual” (read: it never is), no other details were disclosed as far as what led up to the split. The companies did cite “challenging market conditions,” which could allude to other SPAC mergers that have struggled, such as Virgin Orbit and Astra. In any case, what we do know is that a space tourism ride to gaze upon the Great Barrier Reef on a World View balloon is still reservable on the company’s website, for the small price of $500.
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