Major News
Earth Observation
Array Labs raises $20M Series A to scale production of radar satellites for 3D Earth mapping. The startup aims to mass-produce radar hardware and deploy formation-flying satellites. They’re making great progress out of Palo Alto on proprietary SAR capabilities, formation-flying, and 3D SAR mapping technology. [source]
Japan’s Ministry of Defense selected seven Japanese companies via public tender for a satellite constellation project intended to ensure stable acquisition of imagery supporting stand-off defense capabilities.The companies listed include SKY Perfect JSAT, Mitsubishi Electric, Mitsui & Co., Synspective, IQPS, Axelspace, and Mitsui Bussan Aerospace. The contract is valued at roughly 282 Bn Yen (~ $1.8 Bn) and is expected to run through 2031. [source]
Eartheye Space announced a contract to supply satellite imagery to an undisclosed Asia-Pacific customer, citing access to hundreds of satellites with resolution “as sharp as” 15 cm. The company brokers and integrates satellite access via partners for tasking and delivery. They do not manufacture or own any satellites themselves. One can expect this ‘secondary’ market for satellite capacity to grow and develop quickly as customer needs catch up to current inventory’s capacity and capability. [source]
Satellogic announced a seven-figure ‘continuous site monitoring’ agreement with a strategic customer. This award comes off the back of 8 figures of awards throughout 2025 that focus on explicitly providing low-latency imagery and data insights to customers. They’re solving what amounted to the key problem that government representatives expressed at GeoInt 2025. Continuous / persistent monitoring at low latency is one of Earth Observation’s - and National Security’s - white whales, so it will be interesting to see how close to realtime that imagery delivery is and who their customer winds up being. [source]
Space Infrastructure
NASA has decided to bring home early four members of the International Space Station Crew-11 because of a medical issue with one of them, a first for NASA. The 4 member crew of the mission will be returning to Earth in the coming days. Once they depart, there will only be three people on the International Space Station, which will affect the station’s operations. The three include the two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut from an earlier Soyuz mission. A new SpaceX crew isn’t slated to launch until February to help keep the massive orbiting lab running. [source]
Starlink performed 148,696 avoidance maneuvers between June and November 2025. The FCC approved a second tranche of 7,500 Starlink Gen2 satellites Jan. 9, expanding the size of SpaceX’s authorized next-generation constellation which will magnify the need for active collision avoidance in LEO. [source]
United Semiconductors is collaborating with Aegis Aerospace Inc. on a new in-space manufacturing facility to produce essential semiconductor materials. [source]
Araqys-D1 / Dcubed-1, manifested by Exolaunch, will fly on Falcon 9 on Jan 11, marking Araqys’ first on-orbit demonstration of manufacturing a structure directly in free space. Hawkeye 360 cluster 13 consisting of Hawk-13A, Hawk-13B and Hawk-13C joining this Twilight mission in dusk-dawn orbit. [source]
Astroscale Japan has been awarded a JPY 1 billion ($6.3m) contract by the Ministry of Defense to develop a general gripping mechanism system designed to securely grab national satellites under a wide range of on-orbit conditions. [source]
ThinkOrbital Inc. announces Seed Round led by TFX Capital to accelerate defense-driven space capabilities, on-orbit servicing, and in-space construction. [source]
Launch Vehicles
AE Industrial Partners, LP has agreed to acquire a controlling interest in L3 Harris’ space propulsion and power systems business at a total enterprise value of $845 million. The RL-10 engine, a workhorse for the Vulcan rocket and ULA missions, is among the assets included in the pending 60% stake sale to AE Industrial Partners. The RL-25 System - relevant to SLS is excluded from the sale. AE Industrial Partners intends to rebrand the business group as Rocketdyne, reviving the Aerojet Rocketdyne brand that L3Harris acquired in 2023. [source]
SpaceX sweeps nine national security missions for SDA and NRO under NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 for $739m. They’re in competition with ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Stoke Space for the full $5.6B. Last year SpaceX lost 2 contracts to ULA during both rounds in April and October. [source]
Commercial launch startup Landspace has secured formal contracts to launch satellites for China’s two main megaconstellation projects. One of those is 13000 Guowang satellites of which only 136 have been launched a dozen at a time on Long March rockets, which leaves ~1000 launches left. [source]
INNOSPACE signed a multi-launch agreement with the Atlantic Spaceport Consortium (ASC), choosing Santa Maria (Azores) as its European launch base. The deal provides priority, long-term access to the Malbusca Launch Center for a five-year period starting in 2026. This comes weeks after Innospace reached another launch facility agreement with Southern Launch in South Australia. They also have Alcantara (Brazil) and presumably Naro (South Korea). [source]
Business Moves
Starlab Space announced an investment from Seven Grand Managers, an asset management firm with >$1B AUM. (Starlab Space is the joint venture between Voyager Space, Mitsubishi, MDA, and Airbus). There was no disclosure as to the amount of the investment by Seven Grand Managers.This reflects increased commercial acceptance of a private successor to the ISS or other space habitats. [source]
Lonestar data holdings closes $6.6M seed round and names new CEO. Stephen Eisele steps in as CEO to focus on market expansion and revenue growth as Chris Stott takes a new role as executive chair to continue Lonestar’s long-term strategy and building towards the vision of lunar data centers. [source]
CUS-GNC closes $760k pre seed round. GNC software is still a critical challenge for RPO, so it’s good to see additional entrants looking to solve this problem. [source]
Karman raises $5M to expand solid rocket motor nozzle production capacity as America continues to increase its domestic manufacturing capability for missiles. [source]
Tech Advances
Momentus, a U.S. commercial space company offering in-space transportation and infrastructure services, announced the development of an additive-manufactured fuel tank. The fuel tank is scheduled to perform flight testing aboard Momentus’s Vigoride-7 Orbital Service Vehicle. The tank was produced in collaboration with Velo3D, a leading provider of advanced metal additive manufacturing technology. [source]
Cape Fear Ventures invests in pre-seed for Juno Aerospace for development of their rotating detonation rocket engine. They’re also partnered with Momentus through a NASA Reach grant Juno won for $2.5m back in Oct 2025. [source]
Schmidt Sciences philanthropy group led by Wendy and Eric Schmidt announce Lazuli Observatory to be deployed by 2029, this space based telescope will be larger than the hubble and include a planet-finding coronagraph, a high-resolution wide-field camera and a light-splitting spectrograph—will study the atmospheres of distant worlds, dissect the light from exploding stars and tackle mysteries such as the nature of dark energy. They’re also working on ground observatories including the Deep Synoptic Array, which will study the sky at radio wavelengths, while its counterpart the Argus Array will observe in visible light. A third smaller-but-scalable array will gather spectra of cosmic targets such as exoplanets and supernovae. [source]
