Bikini time (2/2/23)

Happy Thursday, Payload nation. We’re pumped to see many of your beautiful faces at our happy hour in El Segundo later today! If you’re local and haven’t seen the RSVP, read on for the deets.

In today's edition...🛰️ Go for GHOSt💸 Nyx nabs €40M📝 Contract report

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An Orbital Sidekick for Energy and Security

This week, Orbital Sidekick announced a $10M raise from a group of strategic and existing investors. Energy Innovation Capital led the round, with energy firms Williams and ONEOK participating. The University of Minnesota’s endowment fund, 11.2 Capital, Syndicate 708, and In-Q-Tel also joined the round.

Six-year-old, SF-based Orbital Sidekick is preparing to launch a six-bird hyperspectral sensing constellation this year. That fleet, known as GHOSt, will go up on three SpaceX Transporter rideshare missions throughout 2023. Each GHOSt satellite is ~100kg.

• GHOSt stands for “Global Hyperspectral Observation Satellite,” and has to be one of the best constellation names that we’ve heard to date.

• SIGMA, short for “Spectral Intelligence Global Monitoring Application,” ain’t bad either. SIGMA refers to Orbital Sidekick’s hyperspectral “intelligence” engine for end users.

“We think of ourselves more as an intelligence company than a satellite company,” Orbital Sidekick CEO Dan Katz told Payload, because it sells analytics (or “intelligence”) rather than raw space data.

The hyperspectral pitch

Hyperspectral sensors let us observe changes on Earth’s surface that aren’t obvious to existing satellites or the human eye. GHOSt will capture images in 500+ contiguous color bands, from visible to short-wave infrared, across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Example use case: Since the vast majority of pipelines are buried underground, a methane leak might not be easily or immediately detected. “Because we have all of these spectral channels and we’re not just looking for methane, we can look at the secondary indicators of an underground leak,” Katz said. “If methane is leaking underground, it's gonna affect the spectral signature of the surrounding environment…the soil, the vegetation, the water. We can pick that up.”

Finding PMF

Orbital Sidekick works with the energy sector and defense entities. By bringing customers on to its cap table, the startup has validated the business model, Katz argued. “This is why we're really excited about this latest round,” he said. “It really is important with hyperspectral to provide good product-market fit (PMF). Are we actually solving a real-world tangible problem and not just supplying hyperspectral data to these end users?”

Beyond PMF, a bet on Orbital Sidekick—be it investor or customer—is a bet that vertical integration (acquisition, processing, and analytics) in Earth observation is better than picking off one part of the value chain.

What’s next? Orbital Sidekick has trained its AI models, learned from demo sensors on orbit, and received early votes of confidence. The next step is to launch GHOSt and see whether customers can detect changes in the field early and quickly act on them.

European Privately Funded Space Capsule Nabs €40.5M

The Exploration Company has closed a €40.5M Series A. The round follows a €5.3M seed round, closed in November 2021.

The Franco-German startup is developing a reusable space capsule, Nyx, that will fly science missions, resupply space stations, and, with any luck, eventually take crews to and from orbit. The vehicle is designed to carry max payloads of 4,000 kg to LEO for up to 6 months at a cost of €15,000/kg.

"Nyx, our spacecraft, is the first space capsule to be privately funded, the first to use green propellants, and the first to open source its operating system," CEO Hélène Huby said in a statement. “As such, we can enable nations, space, and non-space industries and individuals to participate in and contribute to the building of the new space world."

EQT Ventures and Red River West led the hefty funding round, with participation from new and existing investors. The startup says it will use the funds to commercialize the maiden full-scale prototype of Nyx, finalize and launch a second capsule demonstrator, and expand its workforce.

But first, it's bikini time

Before testing its full-scale demo, The Exploration Company will first launch its subscale “Bikini” reentry demonstrator. The name, we assume, is a nod to the demonstrator’s stripped-down configuration.

The subscale demonstrator is expected to launch aboard the maiden Ariane 6 flight. That mission was initially scheduled for late 2022, but delays in Ariane 6’s development have pushed the first flight out to late 2023.

What does the future hold? The first full-scale Nyx capsule is set to launch in 2026. Before that, a second capsule demonstrator, which will likely offer more coverage than a bikini but not the full winter coat, will launch in 2024.

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In Other News

• True Anomaly is preparing to launch two “orbital pursuit” spacecraft, per Wired.

• India cut space expenditures by 8% in its 2023–2024 budget.

• Officials from ISRO met with counterparts at NASA, the Department of State, and other federal agencies to forge deeper civil space partnerships.

• Most seats on upcoming Axiom missions to the ISS will be for government customers, SpaceNews reports.

• Sierra Space has completed a third stress test of its inflatable habitat, exceeding NASA certification requirements.

• Tel Aviv University opened Israel’s first ground station for quantum and optical communication.

The View from Space

Payload purchased this via SkyFi's marketplace. In the image, you can see Tesla’s Giga Nevada factory in Sparks, NV. Tesla recently said it would spend $3.6B to expand the facility to accommodate high-volume production of Semis and more EV batteries.

Guess we’ll have to task a satellite in a few years to see how the Gigafactory is growing…