Moonshot #31

Space gets the political treatment, Axiom and Gravitics ink a deal, Firefly's CEO departs, 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 photograph of a defunct H-2A upper stage floating aimlessly in LEO, taken by a Japanese debris removal spacecraft, ADRAS-J. Credit: Astroscale

Commercial Space in Politics – Milwaukee hosted the 2024 GOP convention last week, and babydog was not the only thing on everyone’s mind. Though it’s somewhat rare for the cosmos to be a political party platform, the accelerating geopolitical space race means that, obviously, a protective Republican policy is fit to follow. The GOP plans to best a competitive nation like China by endeavoring to prosper economically in space. While China’s commercial space industry is largely tied to the government in a way that may hinder innovation, the U.S. industry is thriving between its established firms and disruptive startups. The space boom we’re witnessing right now is reminiscent of the computing boom of yesteryear, and the GOP plans to continually support U.S. dominance in this category.

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This edition of Moonshot is brought to you by the Space Resources program at the Colorado School of Mines.

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Gravitics & Axiom – Gravitics has landed a $125-million contract to provide Axiom Space with a “pressurized spacecraft,” or module, for Axiom’s future space station. It’s a huge opportunity for Gravitics, as Axiom’s commercial space station is backed by NASA and raring to go, set to launch as early as two years from now. This is the biggest deal to date for Washington-based Gravitics, although the startup also holds a development contract with the U.S. Space Force that could ultimately lead to a big payday. As for now, this is all conjecture – we’ve yet to see one of Gravitics’ modules in action. Clearly, Axiom has seen enough to earn its confidence in the hardware startup.

Astroscale – Japanese company Astroscale continues to prove itself with ADRAS-J, also known as Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan. In early July, the debris-hunting spacecraft was able to circumnavigate its target piece of space junk – a defunct Japanese upper stage – while maintaining a close distance of 50 meters. The examination is meant to prepare a future mission for actually extracting the upper stage from LEO, by testing proximity operations and capturing valuable photographs. The spacecraft did encounter an “attitude anomaly” during its inspection, prompting ADRAS-J to abort its close approach, while engineers studied (and fixed) the issue.