Lifeboat (1/11/23)

Wow…Today marks Payload’s 300th daily newsletter. We’ve come a long way since we flipped the switch and converted our weekly newsletter into a daily one. And we’ve grown beyond the inbox into audio, IRL, and more. 

Whether you’ve been with us since Day One or you just signed up, thank you for boarding the rocket ship. And don’t forget…we’re just getting started. 

Today’s newsletter: 🎙️ Pathfinder #0030🛰️ Astranis’s new hire🛶 A Soyuz home💸 The term sheet

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Pathfinder #0030, featuring Astranis CEO John Gedmark

For his first Pathfinder podcast of 2023, Ryan took a field trip to San Francisco to visit the 120,000-square foot digs of Astranis. 

Today's episode is brought to you by Altek Space, a custom manufacturer of essential parts and components for rockets and satellites.

For the uninitiated, Astranis aims to build small, cost-effective GEO satellites that will beam targeted chunks of broadband service down to under- or unconnected parts of Earth. 

The company got its start in 2016 and graduated from Y Combinator’s winter batch the very same year. Two years later, Andreessen Horowitz (or a16z) wrote its first check to a space startup when it led Astranis’s Series A. The space internet startup would later go on to raise $250M from the likes of BlackRock, Baillie Gifford, and Fidelity (i.e., blue-chip growth investors).

In the coming weeks, the satellite unicorn is preparing to launch its first MicroGEO satellite into a geostationary orbit roughly 22,000 miles above our head. That first MicroGEO bird will provide Alaskans with a significant connectivity boost. 

The company has a lot more cooking, Astranis CEO and cofounder John Gedmark tells us on today’s episode. 

Along with Arcturus, its Alaskan satellite, Astranis plans to launch four more on a Falcon 9 later this year. As we saw firsthand, Astranis is ramping up production and satellite testing at its sprawling facilities, which have housed World War II ship makers, Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, and now, software-defined satellite makers 

During our Pathfinder recording, Gedmark also broke some news about a key executive that Astranis recently hired. Read on for more. 

What else did we discuss? 

The value of GEO vs. LEO, bringing connectivity to Machu Picchu, buying an entire Falcon 9 rocket, use cases for space-based internet, geopolitics…and plenty more. Before we let him go, John also shared his personal 2023 goal, an under-the-radar sci-fi rec, and a very fun fact with us. 

If nothing else has convinced you that this is a must-listen convo, come for the visuals. This is Pathfinder’s first video recording in 4K HD—and there’s a full-sized MicroGEO model satellite situated behind Ryan and John throughout today’s episode.

Pathfinder #0030 is live now. Listen or watch on: 

📺 YouTube,📱 Apple Podcasts,🎧 or Spotify

Astranis Taps Doug Abts to Scale Commercial Sales

Doug Abts is joining Astranis’s C-suite as its new chief commercial officer. Abts, a former Navy SEAL and grad of Harvard Business School, comes to Astranis by way of Viasat, where he was GM of the publicly traded company’s in-flight connectivity (IFC) business. Abts grew Viasat’s IFC biz into a “multi-hundred million dollar in annual revenue business,” Gedmark told us.

“I think it just speaks to all the momentum that we have been gaining in our commercial sales,” Gedmark said. “We've had a huge amount of success with a very small sales team and effectively zero marketing spend.” With Astranis’s new facility and production ramp, “we’re pretty excited about blowing it out of the water.”

Astranis has already leased its first MicroGEO out to Pacific Dataport, an Anchorage-based satellite middle-mile provider, to provide comprehensive coverage across the sparsely populated state of Alaska. In December 2021, Astranis also announced a deal with Andesat, a Peruvian telco, to extend connectivity to underserved, remote pockets of Peru—and help cell networks leapfrog from 2G to 4G across the country.  

And there’s more to come. “Stay tuned,” Gedmark told Payload. “We have multiple signed commercial contracts that we have not announced yet.”

A New Ride Home

A lifeboat for members of the ISS crew is on the way. A Roscosmos investigation of a leak in the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft found that the ship is unsafe to use for a ride home, and the agency announced this morning that it will send an uncrewed Soyuz to the station to use instead. 

What happened? Last month, a micrometeoroid struck an external coolant loop on the Soyuz MS-22, which was docked to the ISS. The impact made a tiny hole that resulted in all the coolant in that loop leaking into the void of space.

• NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin journeyed to the ISS aboard that capsule, and were expected to make the return trip in March. 

The solution: Roscosmos reviewed the data from the leak and determined that it rendered the Soyuz MS-22 capsule unusable for the journey home. 

The three crew members will now have to extend their stay on the station for an unknown amount of time. Russia plans to send up the MS-23 capsule, which was originally planned to carry three cosmonauts to replace the departing crew. The agency hasn’t yet announced when that crew’s flight will launch.

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Global markets are roiled by inflationary pressures, geopolitical flux, and the risk of a looming recession. What lies ahead for 2023? How will the ongoing economic uncertainty affect fundraising? What are the key trends that will shape the space industry this year?

Hear panelists from a16z, Lux, and Prime Movers Lab address these questions and other pressing issues, in a discussion of how space startups can navigate the year ahead.

In Other News

• ABL’s RS1 experienced an anomaly after liftoff, according to the startup, resulting in the rocket shutting down prematurely.

• Lynk successfully commissioned its second and third "cell towers in space" ahead of switching on initial commercial service in the spring.

• Momentus ($MNTS) reported that its Vigoride-5 space tug is in “good health” following last week’s launch on Transporter-6.

• Vast is relocating its HQ to Long Beach, CA, and significantly expanding its facilities. ICYMI, check out our Q+A with Vast founder Jed McCaleb.

• TESS, an exoplanet-hunting NASA spacecraft, discovered TOI 700 e, an Earth-size world that could potentially have liquid water on its surface. 

• Axelspace, a Japanese EO company, will start flipping its satellites while on the dark half of their orbits to collect in-space situational awareness data for NorthStar.

• SpaceX scrubbed a Starlink launch to examine the Falcon 9’s second stage, and will make another attempt today at 10:48pm ET.

• Rocket Lab ($RKLB) is now targeting Jan. 23 for its first Electron launch from the US.

• RFA has secured exclusive access to a SaxaVord launchpad for its One rocket.

🎉 Celebrating Payload 300 🎉

Since launching the daily newsletter more than a year ago, Payload has been growing by leaps and bounds. The Pathfinder podcast and science newsletter Parallax are two such examples. To celebrate our 300th edition, we want your input on what you want to see from us next. We’re not making any promises, but…

The View from Decatur

Seen here: the first Vulcan booster departing ULA’s Decatur, AL factory for a cruise aboard R/S RocketShip to Cape Canaveral. Centaur V, a new variant of the rocket’s upper stage, is up next for transport to the Cape.