Orbital baguette (10/12/22)

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In today's newsletter:🥐 France funds space☀️ Solestial seed raise💸 The term sheet

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France Awards NewSpace Funding

Want to put a number on how seriously France is taking the future of its space sector?

If so, you’re in luck. As part of its €54B ($52.5B) France 2030 Covid recovery package, the country earmarked 2.9% of funds—or €1.55B ($1.51B)—for space initiatives.

Unpacking the news: During the first steering committee meeting for the space component of France 2030, the government announced a number of grants aimed at boosting the country’s newspace industry. Although exact grant numbers were not broken out, in the aggregate, this funding round awards €65M+ ($63M+) to 15 projects.

What is France 2030? 

France 2030 seeks to sustainably transform key national sectors through R&D and industrial investment. As far as space is concerned, France 2030 will provide funding for several different sectors through a number of open calls to industry. This initial announcement of awards was split into four categories:

1. microlaunchers

2. launchpad conversion

3. orbital tugs

4. new calls

Microlaunchers: France is funding a total of 12 projects from 11 companies. Some funds were set aside for specific projects, such as the development of a propulsion system, while other awards have a broader aim, such as developing an entire rocket.

The 11 companies receiving funding were:

• OPUS Aerospace

• Sirius Space Services

• SpaceDreams

• Nobrak

• HyPrSpace (Fun side note: HyPrSpace got funding to develop its OB-1 launch vehicles. The “OB” in OB-1 stands for Orbital Baguette. Talk about proudly French!)

• CMP Composites

• The Exploration Company

• Watt & Well

• HALCYON

• Latitude

• Leanspace

Pad retrofits: The launchpad conversion funding was awarded to CNES. The French space agency will use the money to finish building a new commercial launch facility at the site of the Guiana Space Centre’s old Diamant site.

The Diamant launch facility hosted the first orbital launch from the Guiana Space Centre in February 1967. It hosted its last launch in 1975. In December 2021, CNES announced that it would begin accepting applications from commercial operators of micro and mini-launchers to launch from the facility.

In August, CNES preselected Avio (Italy), HyImpulse (Germany), Isar Aerospace (Germany), MaiaSpace (France), PLD Space (Spain), Rocket Factory Augsburg (Germany), and Latitude (France) to launch from the facility. The first launch from the converted facility is expected to take place in 2024.

Tugs: Exotrail received the only space tug award. As part of the award, the company will launch an initial demo mission in 2024 to validate the ability of its spacevan orbital transfer vehicle to adjust a satellite’s altitude. A second mission will then be launched in 2025 that will carry the first institutional payload.

New calls: The final two elements of the announcement were a pair of new calls for tender proposals. The first, issued by CNES, seeks to promote the development of space data sources in the context of maritime surveillance. The second, issued by Bpifrance, a French public investment bank, seeks to support the development and industrialization of satellite constellations and their technologies.

What next? With a mere €65M of 1.55B spent, this is just the start of what the French NewSpace industry can expect over the next eight years.

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Solestial Raises $10M Seed

Solestial, a startup spun out of Arizona State University aiming to be the go-to solar energy company for space, announced the close of a $10M seed round. The round was led by Airbus Ventures with participation from AEI HorizonX, GPVC, Stellar Ventures, and Industrious Ventures.

The Tempe, AZ-based startup takes a different tack on manufacturing solar panels for space…by building them more like terrestrial manufacturers.

“It’s important to remember that [the] ‘industry standard’—conventional “III-V” space solar technology—was designed for a different time, when launch was so expensive that every project was a billion dollars and payload cost was almost no object,” Solestial CEO Stanislau Herasimenka told Payload via email.

“Solestial starts with silicon, like terrestrial manufacturers, so we can leverage the learning curve progress that has been made in that industry, but we upgrade the materials to survive the environmental rigors of space.”

Wiping the damage away: The radiation environment of space would wreak havoc on solar panels that aren’t designed to withstand it. The type of silicon solar cells used on Earth would be quickly destroyed in space. Solestial uses a modified silicon material pressed into a very thin cell—only 20 microns thick, as opposed to the ~160 micron cells used commercially on Earth.

“The combination of these steps induce a self-curing behavior where radiation damage is annealed away when the cell is heated and exposed to sunlight,” Herasimenka said.

Building the business: Herasimenka has three main priorities for the company now that it’s raised its first round of funding:

1. Completing technical validation of its technology

2. Planning the transition to mass manufacturing

3. Converting over $100M in letters of intent to confirmed orders

Baked into these big-picture goals are loads of hiring and scaling. Solestial is looking to more than double its <20-person team over the next year, and it’s currently hiring for about a dozen engineering positions.

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In Other News

• Cosmic Girl touched down in Cornwall ahead of Virgin Orbit’s ($VORB) first UK launch next month. The launcher has announced the full manifest for the mission, titled “Start Me Up.”

• DART’s impact shortened the asteroid Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced. A win for planetary defense!

• Zero-G “obliterated” its previous annual record for weightless flights in a modified Boeing 727. “We’re talking about a triple-digit record here,” Zero-G CEO Matt Gohd said in a press release.

• Rocket Lab ($RKLB) created a $10,000 scholarship for women in STEM.

• Separately, Rocket Lab announced that Electron has arrived in Virginia ahead of its first launch from Wallops.

• Japan’s Epsilon-6 rocket failed to reach orbit. After deviating from its intended flight path, engineers sent a self-destruct command. This is the first failure of the Epsilon line of rockets.

• Vector Launch, a thought-to-be-dead rocket developer, is back? The company cryptically tweeted a photo of its Vector-R rocket, designed to take 50kg payloads to LEO, with the caption “First mission soon.”

• SpaceX announced Starship’s second private mission around the moon. Dennis Tito, the first person ever to pay for a flight to space, and his wife Akiko will take the trip, Ars’ Eric Berger reports.

The View from Starbase