Europe’s Launch Fault Line Splits the Continent

Favoring Speed Over Performance: SES Moves Forward with mPower

U.S. lawmakers have been fretting since 2018 (when Northrop Grumman bought Orbital ATK) that the national supply base for solid rocket motors was becoming too concentrated.

Incorporating Optical Communications Terminals (OCTs) has become a baseline assumption for nearly every megaconstellation operator (i.e., Starlink, Kuiper, OneWeb Gen2, Lightspeed, PWSA, Rivada, and the EU’s IRIS²) due to their critical role in network capacity, latency, cybersecurity, and ground network costs.

This year Mongolia made two moves that will bring satellite connectivity to the landlocked country and could signal the beginning of sovereign communications unimpeded by authoritarian neighbors.

As the players in NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) transition program approach the second half of their Commercial LEO Destinations Program (CLDP) plans, one of the first-round draft picks just got traded to another team.

Military agencies have long been ideal customers for the satellite industry because of their willingness to pay a premium for resilient communications.

Over the past decade, venture capital (VC) has emerged as a critical source of funding for space startups, with total investment surging more than tenfold, from $0.3B in 2014 to $3.2B in 2022 (note: excludes megaconstellation funding). 

It’s rare that satellite operators, especially those not publicly traded, give granular details about the reasons for their programmatic delays.

iasat refinanced its Inmarsat bridge facility on Sept. 21, issuing $733M of Senior Notes to retire the unsecured bridge loan facility that Viasat entered into on May 30 pursuant to the Inmarsat acquisition close.

Bob Smith, Blue Origin’s CEO of six years, is departing the company in a move widely perceived as the end of a lackluster era.

Our 2020 Maxar initiation report bluntly concluded that the combination of an EO company and a GEO satellite manufacturer was “not a combination that most strategy officers or investment bankers would put high on their priority list.

Rocket Lab’s (Nasdaq: RKLB) latest Electron launch attempt Sept. 19 ended in failure and mission shutdown after an anomaly was discovered shortly after the rocket reached Max Q.

As threats of FY 2024 budget cuts lurk in the shadows of haunting GAO reports, recent awards may hint at which NASA programs and players will be spared.

Starship Gets Ready to Rumble

The Last Mile for Momentus

Viasat goes 0 for 2 on successful satellites. Here are the impacts

Axiom raises $350M, but is it enough to fly?