Faint and fast-moving (12/15/22)

Good morning. Last night, flight controllers called off a spacewalk at the ISS due to a coolant leak from a Soyuz spacecraft docked with the station. Two cosmonauts and would-be spacewalkers were were already suited up and in the depressurized airlock before the EVA was called off.

The good news is that the leak was external to the ISS and that the crew is safe. At this time, it's not clear if the leaky Soyuz will be suitable to bring its crew back to Earth. If not, a new spacecraft will be required. We'll keep you posted with updates as they become available.

In today's newsletter:🌎 Planet earnings recap🎈 TransAstra awards🗣️ Reader survey📝 The contract report

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Planet Reports Q3 2023 Earnings

Yesterday, Planet ($PL) reported record Q3 revenue and projected an annual haul of nearly $200M. The results speak to “strong execution across the company and the mission-critical nature of our data,” CEO Will Marshall said.

To start…

...the self-described “Bloomberg terminal for Earth data” would point you to its scale. Planet is currently flying ~200 satellites, images roughly twice the area of Earth’s land mass daily, and each day captures 30 terabytes of data, 100% of which is ready for machine learning analysis.

GAAP and non-GAAP results: For the fiscal third quarter ending Oct. 31, 2022, the EO giant reported $49.7M in revenue, representing 57% annual growth. Other key metrics were as follows:

• Planet had $425M in cash/equivalents on Oct. 31.

• Gross margin was 50%, compared to 37% in Q3 21

• The firm’s net loss was $40.2M, while adjusted EBITDA was –$12.4M.

• The company had 864 customers (+16% YoY). Here’s the breakdown:

$PL-specific results: Due to the subscription-based nature of its business, Planet breaks out SaaS-style metrics that may be less familiar to space investors. For Q3, Planet reported a 94% recurring ACV and a 125% net dollar retention rate (NDRR).

• ACV, or annual contract value, measures subscription revenue for contracted customers, normalized by year.

• NDRR measures retention of existing customers, and a company’s ability to upsell, or generate additional bookings from them.

Partners on partners: Planet pointed to new Q3 partnerships with Accenture, AWS, and Microsoft. It also highlighted 2022 humanitarian and climate initiatives, ranging from sharing imagery with Kyiv to presenting data at the UN’s COP27 conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

Surprise M&A…Planet has agreed to acquire Salo Sciences for an unknown amount. The SF-based climate tech startup uses Planet products for forest carbon measurement and other environmental use cases. The deal, set to close early next year, will help Planet on its continual quest to move “up the stack” from EO data to analytics/insights.

A near-bullseye

18 months ago in its July 2021 SPAC investor deck, Planet predicted $191M in FY 2023 revenues. Then, yesterday, Planet management guided to FY 23 revenues of $188M-$192M (BTW…Planet’s fiscal year ends on Jan. 31).

$191M vs. $188M–$192M…is as close to a 🎯 as you’re gonna get. “From our perspective, as we went public, we tried to treat it like any other public offering,” Planet President of Product/Business Kevin Weil told us on Pathfinder #0008 (the subtext here being that some space SPACs were less responsible with expectation-setting). “And our goal was to be really thoughtful about how we set expectations for future growth.”

+ Stock pulse check: $PL is down 15% year-to-date and the company has a $1.43B market cap. In pre-market trading, the stock was up 4.6%.

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TransAstra Awards

This morning, TransAstra, a Y Combinator alum building space situational awareness (SSA) and space tug technology, announced that it has received two grants—a NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award and a DoD Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award—to advance its space debris removal and awareness tech.

Right now, TransAstra is focused on space sustainability. It’s building a space tug called Worker Bee that can transfer satellites between orbits using a water-fueled and sun-powered propulsion system, and it operates a proprietary telescope software, called Sutter, that allows telescopes to better identify near-Earth asteroids.

Ultimately, though, the Los Angeles-based startup hopes to turn its focus toward sustainable Moon and asteroid mining.

• Space safety, sustainability, and affordability are baked into the startup’s mission.

• The orbital debris removal and SSA applications funded through these grants support that long-term goal.

Trash capture: The first of the two grants was awarded through NASA’s Ignite program, which provides $150k grants at Phase I to help prepare technology for commercialization. The funding will go towards developing an inflatable orbital debris capture system called the Mini Bee Capture Bag. The capture bag will be designed to capture debris of any shape. The prototype will be designed to capture debris around 10cm in diameter, but the company says it will be able to scale to capture much larger objects.

“We can deliver satellites to higher, more valuable orbits, and upon mission completion, our Mini Bee Capture Bag can retrieve these satellites, and then put them into a disposal orbit,” TransAstra CEO Joel Sercel said in a press release. “This kind of service simply doesn’t yet exist.”

Eyes in space: TransAstra has partnered with ground telescopes to implement its Sutter telescope technology, which uses Optimized Matched Filter Tracking (OMFT) to help telescopes identify very faint, fast-moving objects in the sky. The company will use the DoD grant to tweak this program to work from space. Ideally, in the end, the US Space Force will be able to add Sutter technology to its spacecraft to cheaply and easily augment its SSA capabilities in orbit.

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In Other News

• Turkey’s space agency turned four and shared details about its planned lunar rover.

• Russia and Iran signed an agreement to expand their cooperation in space.

• Twitter’s legal team is leaning on SpaceX lawyers, the NYT reports.

• Chinese startup Landspace failed to launch what would have been the world’s first methane-fueled rocket.

• SpaceX is preparing for a trio of Falcon 9 launches to close out the week.

• Arqit ($ARQQ) disclosed in Q3 earnings that it’s facing an SEC investigation over its SPAC merger. The quantum cybersecurity firm also ditched plans to build and launch satellites, which had been a major part of its product roadmap…

• ICYMI, yesterday was the 60th anniversary Mariner 2 reaching Venus—check out our writeup on the historic mission.

The View from Space

This NASA TV screenshot shows the coolant leak from Wednesday night that we referred to at the top of the newsletter.