Commercial Space

Satellite-based hyperspectral imagery and data provider Pixxel expects to launch its first “commercial-phase” satellites in early 2023, followed by more later that year, representatives said in August while revealing the startup’s latest strategic backer, Accenture.

Outpost Technologies has raised a $7.1 million seed round to develop satellite re-entry and recovery technology.

T-Mobile has announced an agreement to use SpaceX’s Starlink constellation of low-Earth-orbit communications satellites for text message coverage across the continental U.S., Hawaii, parts of Alaska, Puerto Rico and U.S. territorial waters—remote regions outside the signal of T-Mobile’s terrestrial network.

Our roundup of the main aerospace and defense stories making the news this week.

Fifty years after Apollo, NASA is preparing for a permanent presence around the Moon.

The last person to walk on the Moon reflects on the geopolitical importance of a new era of human spaceflight.

The Artemis I flight test of NASA’s superheavy-lift rocket and Orion capsule sets the stage for crewed missions.

Startup Relativity Space successfully completed a full-duration, 20-sec. test run of its Terran 1 rocket with its nine first-stage Aeon liquid oxygen/liquid natural gas engines at Cape Canaveral on Aug. 22, clearing a major hurdle toward a planned debut launch attempt in the coming weeks or months.

NASA is asking the aerospace industry to describe a commercial strategy for the planned deorbiting of the International Space Station, which is currently planned for the end of 2030.

The Defense Department wants to host Space Experiment Review Board payloads on off-the-shelf smallsats.

The U.S. Space Council, in coordination with a variety of regulatory agencies, plans to start meeting with private space companies to discuss reforming space regulation to accommodate new technologies.

Russia's ban on exporting RD-181 engines to U.S. spurs change.

Capella Space’s third generation of synthetic aperture radar satellites, named Acadia, will feature inter-satellite laser communications systems, faster downlinks and higher resolution images.

Blue Canyon Technologies has won a contract to build 18 small passive microwave sounder satellites for weather data company The Tomorrow Companies.

The Federal Communications Commission is revoking plans to award SpaceX up to $886 million over 10 years to subsidize broadband internet service to rural households in the U.S. via the Starlink satellite network.

Benchmark Space Systems has signed an agreement to buy Alameda Applied Sciences Corporation’s electric propulsion technologies.

A Russian Soyuz 2.1b rocket has successfully orbited Iran’s Khayyam satellite.

Rocket Lab is planning its second attempt to capture a parachuting first-stage booster soon.

Commercial technology is catching up with military hardware.

Blue Canyon Technologies has opened a new cubesat factory in Boulder, Colorado, that will increase its annual production capacity from 50 to 85 satellites.

Xona Space Systems has received an undisclosed investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures to fund development of a private low Earth orbit global navigation satellite system.

Blue Origin’s sixth crewed New Shepard suborbital mission took off early Aug. 4 from the company’s flight operations center in West Texas.

Momentus’s Vigoride-3 deployed four additional satellites to low Earth orbit in July as the company works through anomalies discovered shortly after launching the space tug in May.

The acquisitions mean Slingshot will be able to offer satellite operators a better understanding of the growing number of objects on orbit and other threats.

NASA is updating requirements for future private astronaut missions to the International Space Station based on some lessons learned from the pioneering 17-day Axiom Space-1 mission to the orbital science lab flown in April.