Kuiper's workhorses (10/13/22)

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In today's newsletter:⛽ Space Force refueling🔁 Amazon re-manifests📝 The contract report

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Time to Fill Up that Hydrazine 

The Space Force (USSF) has signed on to be one of the very first customers of a gas station in space. 

This week, in-space refueling company Orbit Fab won a $13.3M USSF contract to gas up geostationary (GEO) military satellites starting in 2025. Under the four-year contract, which was first reported by Bloomberg, the Colorado-based space startup will deliver hydrazine propellant to at least one Space Force satellite in GEO. 

If you build it, they will come: Jeremy Schiel, cofounder and chief development officer of Orbit Fab, told Payload he expects the Defense Department’s buy-in to boost the company’s credibility on the commercial market. 

“This is another focal point showing the commercial industry that the government is buying” Orbit Fab’s services, he said. “We’re getting derisked…and it’s less likely we won’t be around in five to 10 years…That makes it easier to work with Orbit Fab.”

Orbit Fab, which was founded in 2018, signed its first refueling contract with Astroscale US in January. It received $12M in March to add its proprietary RAFTI refueling port to military satellites.

Logistics are critical to national security on the ground. It’s no different in space, where mission requirements or maneuvering around debris can force critical satellites to burn through precious fuel and shorten their service life.  

“If we can get fuel as a service, we don’t have to build the infrastructure on orbit, and we can focus on protecting the satellites,” Col. Joseph Roth, the director of innovation and prototyping at US Space Systems Command, told SpaceNews in April. 

Imagine all the use cases: Schiel said on-orbit refueling has implications beyond service life extension, including allowing a builder vehicle to assemble assets in orbit that are too large to fit on a rocket in one piece. 

“In my mind, everything follows refueling,” Schiel said. “The economy can only grow when you have a cheap and reliable fuel source that allows you to repurpose assets you already have, like on Earth.”

Share this with someone driving hydrazine-powered space vehicles around GEO:

Amazon Re-Manifests First Kuiper Sats 

The e-commerce giant behind Project Kuiper has changed its travel plans for Kuipersat-1 and Kuipersat-2. 

On Wednesday, Amazon said its first two demo satellites will launch on United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket in early 2023. In late 2021, Amazon said it would launch the two demo birds with ABL Space Systems in Q4 of this year. 

• ABL is targeting a maiden flight of the RS1 rocket, we presume, before the year is out. 

• ULA, meanwhile, is eyeing a first launch of Vulcan in Q1 2023, the Boeing/Lockheed joint venture said yesterday. 

Kuiper has workhorses aplenty

In April, Amazon announced the largest commercial block buy of rocket rides in history. ULA will provide up to 47 launches to support Kuiper’s deployment. Arianespace is contracted to fly 18 Kuiper missions on Ariane 6, while Blue Origin’s New Glenn will kick in 12 launches (with the option for 15 more). 

• For ABL, it’s not goodbye, it’s see you later. Amazon will retain two launches with the California rocket unicorn. 

• “This diverse launch portfolio reduces risk associated with launch vehicle stand-downs, and gives us flexibility to use different rockets to address different needs,” Amazon said Wednesday. 

The bigger picture

While we’re reluctant to deploy “space race” clichés at Payload, indulge us just this once. The season of satellite internet megaconstellations is fully upon us, and Kuiper has ground to make up. 

SpaceX has hoisted 3,400+ Starlink satellites and launched multiple business lines for the service. OneWeb faced deployment hiccups after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but has plans to get back on track and has already launched over two-thirds of its constellation. 

Yes, but…Amazon will tell you it’s not about who gets a full fleet up first. And the company is sinking serious cash—to the tune of $10B—in Kuiper, with 1,000+ Amazonians working on the project. 

+ While we’re here: Kuipersat-1 and -2 are secondary payloads on Vulcan, which will fly Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander as its primary passenger.

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• Sierra created a corporate VC arm that will back healthcare, computing, telecom, and clean energy startups. 

• TESS, NASA’s exoplanet surveyor, entered safe mode on Monday. NASA says recovery operations are underway—have they tried turning it off and back on again?

• Starlink for RVs has 100,000+ customers. As our friend Case Taylor notes, that equals ~$162M in annualized revenue.

• Microsoft demoed telehealth services in a remote Australian community using HoloLens augmented reality headsets, Azure cloud services, and Starlink dishes.

• Crew-4 will undock from the ISS in roughly an hour (10:05am ET). 

• NASA’s next Artemis I attempt will be Nov. 14. While we’re marking our calendars, Rocket Lab ($RKLB) and Virgin Galactic ($SPCE) will report Q3 results on Nov. 9 and 14, respectively, after the bell.

The View from Space

If you haven’t already seen SpaceX’s time-lapsed video of a Falcon 9 landing—shot from a droneship-mounted camera—well, we highly recommend that you fix that: