Moonshot #7

Galactic 01 readies for launch, Orbiter gets a case of the spins, SpaceX reveals their🔥 take on the next Starship launch, and Apex announces a $16 million raise

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!

And here is the commercial space beat…

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane, VSS Unity, on the Unity 25 test flight May 25. Credit: Virgin Galactic/Space News

Virgin Galactic – After an under-the-radar yet successful test flight in late May, Virgin Galactic sets a date of June 29 for the launch of its first commercial SpaceShipTwo flight. Within this mission, dubbed Galactic 01, three undisclosed passengers from the Italian Air Force and National Research Council of Italy will be onboard to conduct microgravity experiments in flight. Should all go successfully, their next flight, Galactic 02 will carry the first “tourists” – who signed up for $450,000 a pop – to space in early August. It remains to be seen if the company will experience any hesitation following the tragic OceanGate accident. The space tourism company certainly hasn’t had a smooth or consistent ride; in fact, May’s test launch was the first suborbital flight in two years after Branson’s 2021 voyage, which raised concerns from the FAA regarding an imprecise flight course. Obviously, we hope for the best, and that proper precautions are taken.  

Launcher & Starfish Space – California company Launcher, which was acquired by Vast back in February, suffered a serious case of the spins last week after their Orbiter spacecraft separated from SpaceX’s Transporter-8 launch vehicle. A software issue caused the spacecraft to start rotating at a fairly high speed, requiring it to dump its payloads prematurely. One of those payloads was Starfish Space’s Otter Pup, which also began to spin at a rate of 1 full rotation per second. The Otter Pup team is attempting to slow its roll this week using its “torque rods,” which interact with Earth’s magnetic field to regain control. We’re wishing these teams well in their efforts to find stillness (namaste). 

Arianespace – Call it a moment of “senioritis,” but the final launch of the soon-to-be-retired Ariane 5 rocket couldn’t quite pull through last week. Due to some underperforming transmission lines, Arianespace decided to ground the spacecraft until full technical confidence can be achieved. Unfortunately, this not only delays the Ariane 5 retirement but also the deployment of two different government satellites – one from the German Space Agency and one from the French military. That being said, it shortens the gap where Europe will be without independent large satellite launch abilities, which will only be restored when the also-delayed Ariane 6 rocket gets back on track.    

Rendering of Apex’s Aries satellite, which is designed to be mass-produced for a range of customers. Credit: Apex/Space News

Apex – Just last week, Apex — a satellite bus mass-manufacturer startup — announced that it had raised a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Shield Capital to the tune of $16 million. This brings the company up to a total of $27 million raised across previous and current rounds. The additional loot will be used to develop the creatively named “Factory One” for Apex, which is set to be a 4,600-square-meter production facility in Los Angeles that the company will use to scale up production of its Aries satellite bus.

Eutelsat – French satellite operator Eutelsat has decided to dump a recent purchase of a service provider, Bigblu Broadband. The sale appears to go against the trend of satellite companies acquiring service providers in an effort to cozy up with customers, but Eutelsat may not be reversing course completely – they may just have their eyes on the prize that is OneWeb, which has its own network of distributors.

CesiumAstro – Austin-based startup CesiumAstro recently announced a deal with the United States Air Force, for which they will produce an antenna to connect a remotely piloted aircraft – called a Reaper – with MEO and LEO satellites.

ispace – Japanese company ispace has not only been busy developing its Series 2 lunar lander (to avenge the death of Hakuto-R) at its facility in Denver, Colorado – but they’ve also just selected former NASA astronaut Ron Garan to serve as CEO of the U.S. subsidiary. Garan and ispace claim to share the same view of cislunar goals, in the belief that “the moon holds the key” not just to a future space settlement but also in “improving life on Earth.” 

SpaceX – All aboard! With a huge party bus of payloads, SpaceX celebrated a successful launch of their Transporter-8 spacecraft on June 12. Within the 72 payloads, hyperspectral imagery satellites were certainly a theme, such as Orbital Sidekick’s GHOSt-3 satellite which was added to a growing hyperspectral constellation. SpaceX also announced that they are planning the next Starship launch for some time in 6-8 weeks. Minivans beware. This next launch will also feature a new “hot-staging” approach, which means “the Starship upper stage will ignite its engines while still attached to the Super Heavy booster.” While this approach might mean the most significant single change to the vehicle, Musk has stated that well over 1,000 other adaptations have been made ahead of the next test launch. And perhaps Musk is hoping all this additional money spent on Starship will help support the potential new fundraising effort that would value SpaceX at around $150 billion.