Major News
Space Sovereignty
Loft Orbital wins €50M SAR contract from French space agency CNES to be prime contractor for DESIR SAR satellite with Thales and Tekever to deploy in early 2029. This project is part of France’s Defense Procurement Agency’s efforts to secure sovereign national radar imaging. [source]
Marble Imaging entered a strategic partnership with French aerospace and technology company Safran Space to use their high-performance optical payloads, Seeing230, in Marble’s upcoming satellite constellation for daily collection of high resolution multispectral imaging. [source]
First two Open Cosmos satellites planned to launch on Rocket Lab Electron on January 22 following their Ka-band spectrum licensing last week that Lichtenstein transferred from Rivada Space. [source]
SpaceRISE consortium consisting of almost every European prime, but primarily SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat, initiates procurement for IRIS2 satellite and launch services to deploy sovereign military communication constellation. [source]
ESA member states have pledged €73 million towards further development of Swissto12’s HummingSat, a smallsat for GEO communications. The funding will accelerate the deployment and readiness of the platform to meet a growing demand for commercial and sovereign communications. [source]
Space Infrastructure
Blue Origin announces Terawave, a hybrid LEO/MEO communications constellation consisting of 5,408 optically interconnected satellites enabling ultra-high-throughput (projected 6Tbps) links between global hubs and distributed user connections on the ground; planned for launch in Q4 2027. [source]
Italian space logistics specialist D-Orbit has raised $128 million in the first closing of a Series D investment round to enable strategic acquisitions, accelerate the build-out of D-Orbit’s orbital logistics infrastructure, expand in-orbit transportation services, scale industrial capacity for ION missions and advance new operational capabilities. [source]
United States Space Force awards $52.5M contract to Starfish Space to deorbit satellites in the SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture constellation when the sats reach their expiration date. [source]
Atomic-6 signs a new development agreement with Starpath to continue joint work on a deployable composite boom for vertical deployable solar array system for the moon. [source]
NASA and the Department of Energy have partnered to develop nuclear reactors for the moon and prepare to release request-for-proposals from commercial industry. [source]
Voyager Technologies announced a new contract with Space LiinTech to manifest a new payload to the International Space Station, advancing microgravity-enabled drug discovery. [source]
SpaceWorks and Astral Materials have successfully completed Payload Build Round 1 and move on to Build Round 2 to develop in-space manufacturing for semiconductors. [source]
Launch
Astra ships 110 hall thrusters reaching $45M 2025 revenue, breakeven EBITDA, and 100% Satellite Engine Mission Reliability. [source]
Gilmour Space Technologies raises 217M at a billion+ valuation making the rocket company the first Australian Space Unicorn. [source]
Rocket Lab experiences a testing setback for Electron prompting schedule adjustments. The company stressed that the issue was identified during ground testing rather than flight, allowing corrective action before launch. [source]
German startup ISAR Aerospace delayed its second Spectrum rocket launch attempt after identifying a pressurization valve issue. Engineers emphasized the delay was precautionary, and the company stated the issue does not indicate a systemic design flaw. [source]
Scottish rocket builder Orbex files for bankruptcy and has signed a letter of intent to sell to European space logistics startup The Exploration Company. [source]
Blue Origin planned the next launch of New Glenn to reuse the booster from their second launch and deploy the second tranche of AST SpaceMobile’s Bluebird communications constellation. [source]
Business Moves
Samara Aerospace closed their $10M seed round, led by Balerion Space Ventures, to deploy their solar panel stabilization technology for an ultra-stable satellite platform. [source]
Washington Harbour acquired Radome Services, which was rebranded as Outpost Mission Services, to anchor a roll-up strategy in their space ground station servicing business. [source]
TakeMe2Space raises $5M, led by Chiratae Ventures, to scale in-orbit AI inference compute for orbital data centers. [source]
Tomorrow.io has announced DeepSky AI enabled weather monitoring constellation [source]
Tech Advances
Warpspace has completed the Series C financing round through a third-party allotment of new shares, led by the Space Frontier Fund II, to accelerate efforts toward the market launch of its multi-protocol optical modem “HOCSAI” and its Digital Twin System “DTS.” [source]
Teledyne’s Speedster HyViSI focal plane arrays launched aboard NASA’s BlackCAT CubeSat Mission to demonstrate new Si-PIN hybrid CMOS architecture for improved X-ray imaging. [source]
NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite data is now public following its launch late last year. [source]
