Riches in niches(11/28/22)

Good morning, Payload Nation. Did you miss us? We’ve got a lot to catch you up on today, so let’s dive right in.

In today's newsletter:💸 SynMax fundraise👋 ESA’s new astronauts🚀 CRS-26 + SPORT🗓️ The week ahead💖 Astronaut Snoopy

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Exclusive: SynMax Raises $6M

SynMax, a satellite data analytics startup specializing in oil, gas, and dark ship monitoring, has raised a $6M seed round from a group of existing customers. Bill Perkins, an energy trader and cofounder of SkyFi, and GeoSol Capital LLC participated in the round.

What’s the name of the game for SynMax?

The Houston startup is dedicated to generating unique data analytics in high-value niches.

Rather than bringing any data collection capabilities in-house, SynMax is focused exclusively on generating customer-ready analytics. “The sweetest part of the value chain is the one that controls the end customer,” SynMax CTO Eric Anderson told Payload.

Anderson said that the funding round, which was entirely raised from current customers, speaks to the value of providing analysis of these niches.

“There's been tons and tons of money during this last tech boom that went into launching satellites,” Anderson said. “There's lots of satellite companies now, and my opinion is that those companies are not going to be successful unless companies like SynMax come in to do the last-mile delivery, which is transforming satellite images into SaaS products that businesses want.”

Hyperion: The product that started it all uses satellite imagery to predict changes in oil and gas production. SynMax says that Hyperion can make these predictions faster than any other data sources at energy traders’ disposal. Anderson, a former energy trader himself, says he was frustrated with the lack of timely and accurate oil supply data.

“Energy trading is extremely fundamental,” Anderson said. “Unlike any other asset that gets traded, it is completely based on supply and demand…and the information that is available is extremely opaque.”

• Government data on the movement of frac crews, for example, has a four-month delay before it reaches traders, making it tough to accurately predict supply.

• Frac crew = the team needed to run a fracking operation.

SynMax’s analytics stack scans Planet optical and SAR imagery for frac crews and oil rigs. Frac crews tend to move around every week or so depending on the well operators’ needs, Anderson said, while rigs stay in place for several weeks at a time. Tracking the movement of these assets provides the backdrop for a much faster, more accurate oil supply estimate.

Theia: The company is currently building out Theia, its second product, which uses the same satellite data with a different detection algorithm for a new target: dark vessels. These vessels are ships that turn off their automatic identification system (AIS)—a voluntary, unencrypted radio signal—to evade detection.

Ships may turn off their radios for benign reasons, like taking an unapproved route to save a bit of fuel, but many dark vessels shun AIS and seek secrecy to obscure trafficking, illegal fishing, or piracy, among other illicit activities.

“All of our goods, at one point in their life, were on a ship,” Anderson said. “The entire value of the Earth moves on the ocean, and it's two thirds of the Earth's surface, and it's extremely poorly monitored.”

Governments are particularly interested in dark vessel tracking data, as are companies with value at risk on the high seas.

What’s next? With the closing of its seed round, SynMax is looking to make a slew of new hires to A) speed up Theia development and B) get to work on new product ideas. In keeping with its first focus—energy trading—the startup’s next product idea is for a coal pile monitoring platform that can give users advance indications of energy stockpile levels.

“I think it is under-appreciated, the value of data in energy transition,” Anderson said. “Everybody loves talking about how we're going to build more renewables, more charging stations and more infrastructure, etc. But…the transition period is extremely delicate and needs to be done properly. And the way to do it properly is to give stakeholders better information.”

Meet Europe's New Astronaut Candidates

Last week, ESA chief Josef Aschbacher announced the newest class of astronauts, the first in 13 years. The new recruits will kick off a 12-month basic training program this spring.

What’s different this time? Europe’s new astronaut corps are split into three buckets:

1. Career astronauts, who will be employed by the agency and begin preparing for a mission to space.

2. Reserve astronauts, who will retain their day jobs and moonlight as astronauts in training. This is a brand new concept for ESA.

3. Parastronauts, who have physical disabilities. This is a feasibility study that opens up opportunities for candidates with selected disabilities.

The process…Well, it certainly wasn’t a cakewalk. ESA winnowed down a pool of 22,523 qualified applicants and 247 parastronaut candidates to just the 17 finalists announced last week.

+ Want to go deeper? Andrew wrote a longer story on the new astronauts—head to our website to read it.

SpaceX, NASA Launch ISS Resupply Mission

SpaceX launched its 26th ISS resupply mission on Saturday, hoisting roughly 7,700 pounds of hardware, food, cubesats, and scientific experiments to the station. For the cargo mission, SpaceX used a brand-new Falcon 9 booster and Cargo Dragon capsule.

The cargo ship docked with the ISS yesterday morning. Among other things, the Dragon was carrying deployable solar arrays, a joint Brazilian and US satellite named SPORT, and Thanksgiving food—better late than never!

In an online story, Payload took a closer look at the CRS-26 manifest and wrote a bit more about SPORT, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between NASA and AEB, its Brazilian counterpart. We also caught up with AEB President Carlos Moura to discuss SPORT, the World Cup, the Alcântara Spaceport, and Brazil’s national space priorities in 2023.

Read the full story here.

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Austin Readers, We're Coming For You

After two great events in LA, it's time to expand our happy hour series. Austin, you're next.

Join Payload, CesiumAstro, and Firefly Aerospace for a space industry happy hour in Austin on December 6th. There will be food, drinks, and, most importantly, plenty of space chatter.

In Other News

• ISRO launched the PSLV C54 rocket successfully on Saturday, carrying Oceansat-3 and eight nanosats to space. Aboard the mission was Anand, Pixxel’s third hyperspectral satellite.

• Orion broke Apollo 13’s record for the farthest distance traveled from Earth of a human-rated spacecraft on Saturday morning.

• South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol is announcing a roadmap for the country’s space economy today. He is expected to propose the idea of creating a national space agency.

• China successfully launched Yaogan-36, a remote-sensing satellite, on a Long March 2D yesterday.

• The “people’s satellite”—aka capacity on ICEYE birds and archived imagery from the SAR provider purchased by the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation—has helped Defence Intelligence of Ukraine spot 2,600 pieces of Russian military equipment.

• The Space Force formally established a component command at the US Indo-Pacific Command—more on what that means here.

• Blue Origin insists that passengers eat breakfast on the morning of their flight, and discourages them from consuming OJ or coffee.

The View from NYC

For a time on Thursday, there were two Snoopys in flight. The Astronaut Snoopy balloon flew in NYC for the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, while a smaller Snoopy flew around the Moon on Artemis I.