Blocked (1/10/23)

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Today’s newsletter:🧊 Quub emerges from stealth🌟 Magnestar pre-seed ✈️ Start Me Up 🔀 On the move

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Exclusive: Quub Comes Out of Stealth

Today, satellite startup Quub emerged from stealth mode with two Air Force contracts in tow.

Pronounced like “cube,” the Lancaster, PA-based startup bills itself as a “data company,” placing an emphasis on the value of its downstream data products. But don’t get it twisted—Quub is taking a verticalized approach to Earth observation (EO) and will very much be flying its own hardware. The startup already has a teensy bit of flight heritage under its belt, with plans to ramp up operations and on-orbit activity.

From basement to orbit: Quub formally incorporated in 2018, though it leverages prior “PocketQubes” work done by cofounder and CEO Joe Latrell. “This all started at a small desk in the basement,” Latrell told Payload.

Finances: Quub has been bootstrapped and also funded through contracts to date.

Flight heritage: The startup successfully deployed (but never established comms with) Challenger, a 3P satellite that launched on Transporter 3. Next, Quub launched Serenity II on Firefly’s Alpha 2 mission (Serenity I was lost on Alpha 1). Serenity II “made orbit and we received a signal from it just before it reentered the atmosphere,” Latrell said. Firefly’s Alpha 2 mission, which successfully reached orbit, deployed its satellites at lower-than-expected altitudes.

Form factor: PocketQubes are measured in Ps vs. the cubesat’s conventional U metric of 10cm x 10cm x 10cm. A 1P satellite is 5cm x 5cm x 5cm. Therefore, a 1P satellite’s volume is only 1/8th that of a 1U cubesat. “Our work is focused mainly on 3P and 6P versions of the design,” Latrell said.

The tech stack: Modularity is key to Quub’s satellite design and operating ethos. The startup will fly a variety of hardware, such as infrared, visible-spectrum, and ultraviolet sensors, along with a proprietary imaging system. Work is underway on a SAR sensor—“that has been extremely difficult but looks promising,” Latrell says. Finally, each sensor is designed as an “independent smart module that can be swapped in and out.”

What’s next? Quub will continue development work on its Aurora satellite design, aiming to layer in more sensors and improve the satellite’s on-board comms system. The startup also expects to more than double revenues and bring on its first set of outside investors.

Read our full online story, which includes Payload’s Q+A with Latrell, Quub’s YouTube explainer, and renders of the company’s satellites.

Exclusive: Magnestar Raises $1.1M

Magnestar, a new startup based in Toronto, has raised a $1.1M pre-seed round to kickstart the development of a platform to help satellite operators predict and avoid potential radiofrequency (RF) interference. 1862 Capital, the Business Development Bank of Canada, BoxOne Ventures, and Entrepreneur First participated in the round.

With its platform, Magnestar hopes to give operators the tools they need to maintain consistent and reliable service from orbit.

“If we are unable to have reliable space services, it actually puts our entire sector in jeopardy,” Jacqueline Good, founder and CEO of Magnestar, told Payload. “I think that a lot of satellite operators are talking about connecting the unconnected, and making sure that the whole world has…reliable service and Internet—and yet if we're unable to have resilient signals between Earth and space, none of that works.”

Crossed wires: Right now, when their signals face interference, operators are left in the lurch. In fact, they often have no idea that it’s happening until customer complaints roll in. Even then, they’re left ill-equipped to figure out the source of interference or how to avoid it in the future.

Magnestar’s solution: “We're building this up to be a clearing house to clear all the communication pathways between Earth and space, as well as a marketplace to be able to, in the future, work through sharing spectrum as well,” Good said.

In practice, that means mapping out and monitoring the communications pathways between Earth and space to determine when interference is likely to occur, as well as hosting a messaging service for operators to communicate with each other to deconflict. Through this data-driven approach, Magnestar hopes to identify patterns of interference for operators to maintain their uptime as consistently as possible.

“A lot of the solutions that are out there are much more focused on large pieces of hardware at the ground station, but we're doing it all using digital infrastructure…so it's much more cost efficient,” Good said.

Coming up…With this funding round, Magnestar is aiming to complete its enterprise-grade RF interference platform and begin onboarding customers.

The startup is also looking forward to the next step in its business: a small component hardware piece that can be added to satellites to assess where RF interference is coming from in space. Magnestar has partnered with the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, to build that component, which would contribute to the startup’s data platform once deployed.

Historic Virgin Orbit UK Launch Ends in Failure

Virgin Orbit’s historic first launch from the Spaceport Cornwall in the United Kingdom, Start Me Up, failed to reach orbit on Monday evening. Shares of Virgin Orbit ($VORB) were off by as much as 22% in pre-market trading on Tuesday morning.

Virgin Orbit reported that LauncherOne had reached space, but the webcast’s mission feed began to spit off erratic telemetry data that indicated its rocket was losing altitude. After a subsequently deleted erroneous tweet about reaching orbit, the company said the rocket’s second stage engine had experienced an anomaly.

Cosmic Girl, the modified Boeing 747 that serves as LauncherOne’s carrier aircraft, returned safely back to Spaceport Cornwall. Procured by the NRO, the mission had nine payloads on the manifest, including Oman’s first Earth observation satellite and ForgeStar-0 (the first satellite from Space Forge, an in-space manufacturing startup based in the UK).

“We will work tirelessly to understand the nature of the failure, make corrective actions, and return to orbit as soon as we have completed a full investigation and mission assurance process,” Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart said in a statement.

The long view: Previously, Virgin Orbit management had discussed launching four to six missions in 2022. The company launched just two missions last year. Start Me Up just narrowly missed a December attempt. As Virgin Orbit struggles to reach its own flight cadence target—and with operations likely grounded for the foreseeable future—the company is also staring down the prospect of shrinking runway.

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In Other News

• Israel’s Air Force is standing up its own space arm.

• An old NASA satellite harmlessly reentered Earth’s atmosphere late on Sunday evening over the Bering Sea, a few hundred miles from Alaska.

• NOAA says the GOES-18 satellite, now named GOES West, is now operational.

• SpaceFields, an Indian startup, tested an aerospike engine at an Indian Institute of Science facility in Bangalore.

• A meteor reportedly streaked across UK skies yesterday.

• SpaceX rolled Falcon Heavy out to the pad for its first 2023 mission.

Payload Insights

Here’s our official graph of launches by country in 2022, along with a look back at activity for the seven years prior. This visualization stands on the shoulders of a giant, Jonathan McDowell, who did great work in cataloging space activities in 2022.

To play around with two interactive versions of this chart, head to our website.