Bird in a box (3/20/23)

Happy Monday, Payload nation. As our March Madness brackets were destroyed over the weekend, our minds drifted back from basketball to space. 

Then, dear readers, the light bulb went off: what if we brought the dark arts of bracketology to space? Today, we’re excited to launch the Payload Mars Madness. Read on for tourny details and how to get involved.

In today's edition...🏀 Payload presents: Mars Madness📦 Satellogic Space Systems🗓️ The week ahead

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In March Madness, your bracket can be busted by an unexpected upset, leaving your dream of predicting the perfect outcome in shambles. On expeditions to Mars, outcomes are equally unpredictable, with a mission’s fate resting on anything from a software glitch to a cosmic dust storm to a mix-up between metric and imperial units. 

Today, Payload is excited to lift the wraps on our Mars Madness tournament and open the competition to all 16k+ of you. Over the course of this week, you’ll vote on the “best”—or your favorite—Mars mission. 

Just to get this out of the way upfront, March Madness ≠ Mars Madness. We are evaluating Mars missions, not basketball teams competing on primetime TV. While a sports tournament has a decisive outcome, a crowdsourced evaluation of the “best” Mars mission is very subjective, open to interpretation, and prone to Twitter clapbacks. 

By our count, men’s and women’s basketball have a total of 714 D1 teams, and their single-elimination annual tournaments consist of 68 teams competing in seven rounds for the national championship. By contrast, the world has launched 48 missions to Mars. So, for Mars Madness, we’ll be skipping the 68-contestant, seven-round schtick and go straight to the Space Sweet Sixteen stage. 

Over the weekend, we handpicked 16 Mars missions to populate our bracket. We didn’t seed them so as to not influence your voting…and because it was too hard. We somewhat arbitrarily grouped them into four regions: 

1. Trailblazers: early missions that laid the groundwork for the future. 

2. Millennials + Zoomers: missions that launched in the 1990s or aughts. 

3. Orbiters: spacecraft that were tasked by various nations to orbit Mars. 

4. Robo-residents: rovers that currently inhabit Mars, or did until very recently. (Pour one out for InSight). 

NB…Overlaps exist between these categories, and the methodology is non-scientific. Bracketology is hard. Decisions were made—such as grouping the US Viking and USSR Mars missions together, but not Mariner 4 and 9. We didn’t include Matt Damon or planned missions—like Mars Sample Return—that surely would have been top-seeded competitors. In any event, this is the bracket we’ve landed on. 

Now for the fun part

We’ll proceed in four stages, with the first round of the tournament starting now. Today, you’ll vote on the first eight matchups (more info on each mission can be found here). The first round of voting will be open for 1.47 Martian sols (aka 36 hours). 

We’ll tally up the votes, announce the winners on social media, and proceed to the Elite Eight in Wednesday’s newsletter. That round of voting will be open for 24 hours. We’ll then proceed with voting on the Final Four in Thursday’s newsletter. On Friday, y’all will pick the crowning champion of Payload’s Mars Madness 2023 tournament. 

So, without further ado, let’s get the ball rolling. Vote now by clicking here.

Buy Your Own EO Satellite

Satellogic is launching a new Space Systems product, the publicly traded satellite operator ($SATL) announced last Thursday. With Space Systems, Satellogic says one can buy and fly own EO satellite “with submeter resolution, proven performance, and custom mission options.” 

The product represents a space-as-a-service offering for those who have a strategic interest in reaching orbit but none of the engineering know-how or flight experience to do so quickly. 

The EO bird-in-a-box play

• Customers can buy a high-resolution EO satellite that comes with the whole gamut of needs. Satellogic will book the SpaceX launch, obtain the necessary ITU licensing, and provide support services. 

• Pricing starts at $10M and a satellite can be delivered in as little as three months. 

• Users can pick their own inclined and eccentric orbits, set tasking over their own points of interest, and spec out satellites for their own mission requirements. 

Satellogic 101

Founded back in 2010 in Buenos Aires, the vertically integrated operator designs, builds, and flies EO satellites fitted with optical and multispectral sensors. Satellogic has launched ~30 satellites to date. With its growing constellation, the company is also leaning into geospatial analytics. 

So far, the highest demand for Satellogic’s services has come from space agencies, research institutions, and defense & intelligence entities. Satellogic CCO Matt Tirman told Payload that Space Systems is a continuation extension of the company’s core goals: 

1. developing a high-res, live catalog of Earth, and…

2. …unlocking EO data for the masses. 

The  opportunity 

Around the world, governments and militaries place a high premium on sovereign space assets. That’s especially true outside the West, where space programs may just be starting up and budgets may be comparably small. 

Tirman said that Satellogic Space Systems strikes an attractive price-to-quality balance for countries that want their own assets. 

“Everything that goes into our satellites, the whole final product, is completely ITAR-free, so that is a huge benefit to friendly foreign governments of the US, and NATO allies,” Tirman said. “We are keenly interested in emerging space programs and high-growth economies.”

Send this to someone who's ready to drop $10M on their very own satellite: 

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In Other News

• Virgin Orbit ($VORB) is preparing for insolvency, Sky News reports, if it is not able to raise emergency funding. 

• SpaceX launched two Northrop-built C-band satellites for SES on Friday. SES-18 and -19 will help free up spectrum for terrestrial 5G networks and provide satellite TV, radio, and data transmission services to the US market. 

• Space Pioneer, a Chinese launch startup, is set to launch China’s first liquid-fueled rocket, Tianlong 2, at the end of March. 

• Aerojet ($AJRD) shareholders voted 99.7% in favor of L3Harris’s ($LHX) proposed takeover, clearing the way for two A&D firms to merge. 

• NASA is officially building the VIPER, a 1,000-pound robo-rover that will search for water on the Moon’s South Pole. 

• SpaceX is now eyeing the third week of April for Starship’s first orbital attempt.

The View from Space

The Canadian Space Agency has rebranded with a very Canadian new logo:

Congrats on the new look, CSA. Suits you well.