Moonshot #20

Investment outlook for 2024, Landspace's successful hop, Sierra Space completes LIFE's burst test, and everything else feeding the space economy.

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!

Landspace tested their vertical takeoff and landing vehicle last week, furthering reusable rocket efforts. Credit: Landspace

Word on the Street – New year, new you zest for space funding, as they say. And by “they,” we mean Space Capital, an early-stage investor and creator of the Space Investment Quarterly Reports (bless). The good news is: the venture firm sees potential for a funding uptick this year, after a rough 2023. That said, it’s hard to say if the sector will reach the heights of 2021, where commercial investment was recorded at a whopping $47 billion. Of course, these are only predictions at this early hour, and investors may still be feeling cautious after the recent trend of Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) mergers, which ultimately led ventures to crash and burn in the public market. But one thing is for sure: there are more investors’ eyes on the industry than ever before, thanks to who venture capitalist Mark O’Connell refers to as the “three amigos” – being Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. It’s now clear, according to O’Connell, “you can actually make money in space.” Now for the bad news: CNBC space reporter Michael Sheetz says that “a handful of space companies are running out of cash and time.” I believe for Earthlings this is known as the last Thursday of the month.

Landspace – After first announcing the rocket in November, Chinese launch firm Landspace successfully conducted a test – or, “hop” – of the Zhuque-3 VTVL-1, a test model for the future stainless steel, vertical-landing, reusable Zhuque-3. Essentially, this hop test involved launching the vehicle to a height of 350 meters before lowering it to land vertically on a separate pad nearby, which it achieved with an accuracy of about 2.4 meters. Landspace plans to launch Zhuque-3 in all its stainless-steel glory in 2025, but in the meantime, the company endeavors for three Zhuque-2 launches this year. All we’ll say is: look out, Elon! The Zhuque-3 is coming for the Falcon 9’s business, honey – and so are Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-3, Galactic Energy’s Pallas-1 and CAS Space’s Kinetic-2, other Chinese rockets that are currently expendable but endeavor to be reusable.

Sierra Space — We’ve got news about the bouncy house of the final frontier! We’re throwing absolutely no shade, because what Colorado-based Sierra Space has created with LIFE (Large Integrated Flexible Environment) is incredibly impressive. Intended to work with future space station Orbital Reef, LIFE inflates up to 300 cubic meters, or about one third of the ISS’s living space. A recent “burst test” at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center yielded great results for its pressure shell, in fact exceeding agency safety requirements. And if you’re wondering what a “burst test” is, it’s pretty much exactly how it sounds.  

AST SpaceMobile — Direct-to-smartphone constellation connectivity will likely be in our near future, not only with Starlink but with AST SpaceMobile, who recently received investments from Google, AT&T and Vodafone, the latter being an existing shareholder in the Texas-based company. The investment will support AST SpaceMobile’s commencement of commercial services this year – with its first BlueBird satellites launching in March via its competition’s Falcon 9 rocket – and develop its larger model, the BlueWalker-3.

Slingshot, LeoLabs, COMSPOC — Announced on January 19th, the Office of Space Commerce recently placed orders with three companies to access commercial data in an effort to establish a space traffic coordination system. The U.S. government office’s Consolidated Pathfinder project will pull catalogs of tracked LEO objects from aerospace SSA companies Slingshot and LeoLabs, and will utilize Pennsylvania-based COMSPOC’s orbit determination services to “fuse those different data sources,” in the words of COMSPOC VP Mike Wasson. The Consolidated Pathfinder project will contribute to the work-in-progress Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS), a basic safety service that the office is required to provide to satellite operators, free of charge. This way, access to space traffic safety information isn’t locked behind a paywall. That being said, companies are still allowed to charge satellite operators for more “advanced” services – but what that distinction is remains to be seen.  

Redwire — Florida-based space infrastructure firm Redwire can’t be feeling “blue” about their new contract with Blue Origin. Although neither company disclosed the number of dollar signs behind the deal, we do know that it asks Redwire to produce four solar arrays for Blue Ring, the orbital transfer spacecraft that Bezos’ space venture first announced in October. In addition to the Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA) systems, Redwire will contribute camera and power systems to the platform. Blue Origin’s commercial ISS successor, Orbital Reef, will also see services from Redwire, who signed on as a partner back in 2021.

Blue Origin assembles the first and second stage of the heavy-lift rocket known as New Glenn, which is up for a coveted national security contract. Credit: Blue Origin

Blue Origin – Beyond Blue Ring contracts, Bezos’ Blue Origin made some more big moves last week, accepting a contract with the Space Force to conduct “integration testing” on its massive New Glenn rocket. The contract offers the company $18 million to conduct this testing, which essentially assesses the launch vehicle’s design and compatibility with national security payloads. Should things go well, there could be more where that came from – a lot more. The Space Force will eventually spend billions of dollars on launch contracts for integral satellites as part of their National Security Space Launch Phase 3 program. Current launch providers for the program include – you guessed it – SpaceX and ULA. Although the Space Force has seven missions set aside for a third provider like Blue Origin, the government is clear that those payloads would be “reassigned to SpaceX or ULA” in the case that “New Glenn is not ready.”