Tie the knot (8/5/2022)

Good morning. Today is Mars rover Curiosity’s 10th birthday! For the last decade, Curiosity has been trekking across the Red Planet’s surface, tracing back its history and searching for signs of life.

If you decide to sing Curiosity a rendition of Happy Birthday today, just know you’ll be joined by a legion of lawnmowers. Husqvarna shipped a software update to its 100,000+ smart lawn mowers to give them the capability to sing happy birthday to Curiosity. We’re not entirely clear on why, but we’re loving the robot solidarity.

In today's newsletter:🖥️ Integrate Q&A❤️ SES/Intelsat📚 Weekend recs

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A Q+A with Integrate Space Corp’s John Conafay and Andrew Sloan

Integrate Space Corp. aims to modernize how you launch your payload through its new software stack. The newly hatched startup is creating a collaborative tool for spacecraft manufacturers, rideshare aggregators, and launch providers to organize missions digitally. 

The basics: Launched by space industry veteran John Conafay and technical lead Paul Reesman earlier this year, Integrate hopes to solve the launch capacity management issue plaguing the industry. They plan to streamline the documentation redundancies and communications gaps between payload and launch provider through the software. 

$$$: The startup raised a $970,000 pre-seed round led by Village Global this past June. Integrate stands as a team of four right now but is growing fast. 

Payload caught up with Integrate CEO/Co-Founder John Conafay and Head of Product & Operations Andrew Sloan. The pair met years ago at SmallSat in Utah, a major industry conference, so it’s only fitting they’ll launch the alpha build of their product in Logan, UT, next week. 

A sneak peek

The full Q+A is available now on Payload, but we couldn’t help ourselves. Here are a few of our favorite snippets: 

1. On modernization: “Every other industry in the world has modernized and digitized these processes…The best way that humans have figured out how to do it is digitally but for some reason, we are not doing it in space yet.”

2. On the goal: “Our mission is to eliminate all points of friction in the space economy by building the digital tools that have been lacking for ages. We envision a thriving space economy accelerated by seamless transactions in partnership, finance, and communication.”

3. On space’s future: “There have just been so many cool people coming into the space. It just lights me up that there are so many gals and people of color that are joining the industry, which means that either they are fighting like hell or the doors are opening. I just love that.” 

Read on here.

More M&A? Well, Color Me Surprised

Consolidation is the order of the day in the legacy satellite world. 

The latest: Luxembourg-based SES and American satellite operator Intelsat are in talks to tie the knot, the FT reports. The GEO operators are long-standing competitors, and in recent memory, duked it out in bankruptcy court. Is it time to let bygones be bygones? 

• Bankruptcy? Intelsat filed for Chapter 11 protection in May 2020 and emerged as a private company in December after reducing its debt load from $16B to $7B. 

As M&A sweeps the satellite sector, “neither wants to be the last one standing,” a source close to the SES-Intelsat talks told the FT. A merger would create a unified entity that produces ~$4B in annual revenue. But these are preliminary talks, and as any investment banker worth their salt would tell you, things can and do fall through. 

The backdrop: Led by Starlink, LEO broadband players are mounting a fierce competitive challenge to the old orbital order. That’s led constellation players who primarily occupy other orbits to join forces (or, at least, to propose doing so). The north star = multi-orbit assets. 

• Intelsat, it should be noted, is already a multi-orbit operator. But this week, SES reported another delay in the launch of the 11-satellite O3B mPower MEO constellation to Q4 of this year.

There’s plenty more horizontal consolidation where that came from…

1. Eutelsat and OneWeb are pursuing a merger, which would give the French satellite operator a LEO beachhead and OneWeb fresh $$$ to finish the buildout of its first-gen broadband constellation. 

2. Viasat, by all outward appearances, is inching closer to closing on its $7.3B acquisition of the UK’s Inmarsat.

As always, there’s also the geopolitical and space sovereignty angles to consider. The French and UK governments would both have stakes in a combined Eutelsat/OneWeb entity, which could complicate negotiations. The Luxembourg government, meanwhile, owns one-third of SES’s voting shares. Finally, London has won significant concessions from Viasat in its acquisition talks with Inmarsat.

How about that timing? An April Credit Suisse report seen by Payload said that an SES-Intelsat tie-up “could make sense,” given their global businesses, mutual interests in MEO, and cost synergies, and potentially deliver a “~+30% uplift to the equity value.” 

More broadly speaking, the Credit Suisse report identifies three trends driving subpar returns for satellite operators over the last five years: 

1. The capex required to build and launch very high throughput satellites (VHTS) doesn’t scale with the revenue they generate. 

2. Video broadcast, a key use case for GEO satellites, is in secular decline and “becoming a material drag” on top-line performance. 

3. The satellite sector is fragmenting, “with ~55 satellite operators globally with high supply driving weak pricing.”

+ While we’re here: Thursday, SES reported H1 revenues of €899M ($920M), up 2.8% YoY. The company’s adjusted net profit was €168M ($172M) over the same period, up 11% YoY. Both SES and Intelsat stand to make billions for clearing spectrum bands and launching new satellites. 

Share this with someone who hates being the last one standing:

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BlackSky will be attending the SmallSat Conference from August 6th 'til 11th in Logan, UT. 

Click the button below to learn more about BlackSky or request a meeting with them at SmallSat.

In Other News

• Virgin Galactic ($SPCE) booked ~$357,000 in Q2 revenue, down 37% YoY. The company’s quarterly operating loss was -$109.7M. The company is targeting Q2 2023 for commercial launch. Virgin ended Q2 with $330M in the bank.

• Astra ($ASTR) won’t fly again in 2022 and is ditching Rocket 3.0 to focus on a larger launch vehicle. The company reported a $82.6M Q2 operating loss on $2.7M in revenue, and ended the quarter with ~$201M in the bank. 

• Globalstar ($GSAT) pulled in $36.8M in Q2 revenue (+22% YoY) and an operating loss of $11.4M (-29% YoY).  

• ESA navigated its Charlie spacecraft around a chunk of orbital debris. All three of the agency’s Swarm satellites—Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie—have now made debris avoidance maneuvers.

• Falcon 9 is averaging one launch every 6.3 days in 2022, following last night’s mission with the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (h/t Eric Berger). 

• Here's more info on Husqvarna's campaign to forge robotic solidarity between Earth and Mars.

The View from Payload's Product Studio

New product launch alert! Payload is proud to announce Parallax, a weekly science newsletter for the space industry written by our staff reporter, Rachael Zisk. She'll be answering all your burning space science questions, from astronomy to the tech that helps us get to and operate in space. We'll have more information for you soon, but in the meantime, subscribe here to make sure you get the first edition.