Main Topics
Human Spaceflight
NASA’s Artemis II returned home! After a successful 10 day journey around the Moon, the Integrity capsule carrying four astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen safely splashed down in the pacific. [source]
Azora Space used their 7cm aperture mobile optical communications terminal to receive a signal from Orion’s laser communication system O2O, setting a commercial distance record of 240,000 miles. [source]
Virgin Galactic announced their return to flight with their new Delta spacecraft following the retirement of Unity two years ago. Ticket prices are now raised from $600K to $750K. [source]
Spacecraft
4iG signed a contract with Northrop Grumman for HUGEO, Hungary’s first GEO communications satellite, and an MOU with Apex to jointly develop 8 EO & SAR satellites. [source]
Apex announced two new high power spacecraft buses that are variants of their Comet bus; Comet Mini will be a 20kW bus, and Comet XL a 100kW bus. [source]
Vantor unveiled two new satellites: Vantage and Pulse. Both are expansions of the platform used for WorldView Legion, with Vantage providing 20cm resolution imaging and Pulse providing 40cm resolution. [Source]
Albedo announced a new VLEO bus Vicinity, providing a platform that can operate at 300km altitude available in 2027. [source]
Spacety raised $190M for Chinese satellite manufacturing and servicing product offerings, and announced plans for an IPO. [source]
Endurosat and Shield Space announced their partnership to develop Broadsword, a demonstration mission for project NEXUS that uses a mothership-style spacecraft to host multiple interception and RPO vehicles for rapid on-orbit deployment. [source]
Defense
The US Department of Defense awarded $1.8B in IDIQs for their Andromeda space domain awareness program to 14 companies amongst 32 competitors. [source]
Lockheed Martin won a $105M contract from the USSF to develop a GPS operational control system under the Architecture Evolution Plan. [source]
Capella was awarded a $48.9M contract under Space Development Agency’s HALO Europa Track 1 program to demonstrate advanced tactical space communications in low Earth orbit. [source]
Business Moves
Xoople came out of stealth with a $130M Series B led by Nazca Capital to map the Earth for AI, and announced their partnership with USSF and L3 Harris to develop optical payloads. [source]
Starfish Space closed a $100M+ Series B led by Point72 Ventures to scale their Otter manufacturing capabilities and execute on contracts with NASA, USSF, SES, and others. [source]
PLD Space received a €30M debt investment from the European Investment Bank to help deliver their inaugural MUIRA-5 launch vehicle later this year. [source]
Portal Space Systems raised a $50M Series A led by Geodesic Capital and Mach33 to continue development and manufacturing of their highly mobile solar thermal propelled spacecraft. [source]
Hawkeye360 filed for their IPO to fund debt repayments and future acquisitions. [source]
Tech Advances
IEEE published a paper on their prototype of over-the-air computation which utilizes radio frequency interference to perform calculations that reduce the need for node computation for operations such as AI and sensor fusion. [source]
