Under the radar (12/16/22)

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In today's newsletter:🚨 New SSA + safety bill 🛰️ Satellogic’s Q3📚 Payload’s picks

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We Won’t Let This Fly Under the Radar

On Wednesday, members of the House Space, Science and Technology committee introduced a bill to properly organize the rules surrounding space safety and space situational awareness (SSA). This bill, the Space Safety and Situational Awareness Transition Act of 2022, was spearheaded by Reps. Don Beyer (D-VA) chairman of the subcommittee on space and aeronautics, and Donald Norcross (D-NJ).

“Space-based operations are now essential to systems our society and national security both rely on, and the number of satellites providing those systems is growing at a geometric rate,” said Beyer. “I hope that this legislation will serve as a strong starting place for future discussions about the way forward on space situational awareness.”

The bill: The key change proposed in the SSA bill would create a civil SSA capability housed within the Department of Commerce. An interagency transition team between the DoC and DoD will work together to get an initial working SSA capability up and running by 2024, and a full operational capability by 2025.

Ultimately, Congress is hoping to make accurate, timely SSA information freely and publicly available. The act supports the use of commercially available SSA data to make this happen, but doesn’t specify how the DoC will work with industry to procure data.

The other key tenets:

• The DoC will provide Congress with an organization plan for SSA capabilities

• NASA will carry out SSA R&D

• Further studies on the cybersecurity, international cooperation, data sharing agreements and research strategy of SSA will also be conducted

“As space becomes more crowded every day, we must manage the risk of collisions, ensure the safety of spacecraft, and support the sustainability of space for the future,” Norcross said in a statement.

$SATL results

Satellogic ($SATL) expects 2022 revenue to be in the $6M–$8M range, the EO satellite operator said in a Thursday business update. In H1 ‘22, “Satellogic took the most significant steps in our history towards realizing our mission, beginning to fully commercialize low Earth Observation,” chief executive Emiliano Kargieman said.

By the numbers

• Satellogic ended H1 with $124M in cash and expects to end the year with $78M–$82M.

• The new-ish “Space Systems” line touts <8-month satellite build-to-launch cycles.

• Asset Monitoring revenues grew at a 35% CAGR year-to-date.

• $SATL is currently flying 26 satellites and expects to launch “up to” 21 next year.

• At 6.2M km2 daily, Satellogic claims to have the “largest high-resolution commercial capture capability.”

The highlights: Satellogic has rapidly padded out its management team and struck key partnerships (Palantir, Ursa Space, Kleos Space, Astraea, SkyFi, Up42, and more). It also bought multiple tickets to space from SpaceX. Finally, on the product side, asset monitoring is growing at a healthy clip, and Satellogic seems to have found some early CaaS (constellation-as-a-service) traction, signing on Albania, Ukraine, and most recently, Mexico for the sovereign EO service.

The lowlights: Satellogic still has a ways to go before it reaches a critical mass of satellites to achieve weekly—and then daily—world remapping. And the EO operator still has some capex-heavy work ahead of it.

Zoom out: As Kargieman has told Payload in the past, “we see ourselves as a data company, not a satellite company.” EO data and services are poised to be a $7.9B market by 2031, Euroconsult finds in a recently released report.

+ To go deeper…listen to Pathfinder #0012 with Kargieman on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple.

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In Other News

• Maxar ($MAXR) will be acquired by private equity firm Advent International for $6.4B.

• SpaceX launched the SWOT mission for NASA.

• Rocket Lab (RKLB) is standing down until Sunday earliest, so NASA and the FAA can “close out final documentation required for launch.”

• NASA and AST SpaceMobile ($ASTS) agreed to collaborate on collision avoidance. The Space Act agreement will provide the company with critical coordination and cooperation data.

• Roscosmos and NASA are closely monitoring Soyuz MS-22 temperatures. The latter says that an external radiator cooling loop is the suspected source of a leak on Wednesday night.

• A micrometeoroid could be the cause of the leak, according to a Russian official.

• Ingenuity aced its 36th sortie on the Red Planet.

• Blue Origin is making an animated space adventure series.

• SpaceX conducted a single-engine static fire test of Ship 24 and good golly was the overhead drone shot something to behold…

The View from Space

Awesome first pictures from the NOAA-21 satellite, which launched Nov. 12 from Vandenberg. The satellite’s VIIRS instrument began collecting data on Dec. 5.