Rocky road (12/21/22)

Happy Hump Day. Tom Cruise and the Mission Impossible crew released footage this week of the actor and DIY stuntman driving a motorcycle off a cliff. It's great and all, but we only have one question: Tom, when space movie? 

Today’s newsletter: 🧭 Q4 retrospective 🚀 Vega C failure💸 The term sheet

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Q4 2022 News Roundup

Can you believe 2022 is nearly over? It’s been a jam-packed year for the space industry, full of groundbreaking moments in science, turbulence in the markets and world order, substantive policy developments, and historic mission firsts.

We’re kicking off our year-end coverage by looking at objects closest in the rear-view mirror. Payload combed through the 53 newsletters we sent and 104 articles we published so far in Q4 to bring you the goods.

October

Firefly got the quarter started on a high note, reaching orbit for the first time with its Alpha rocket on the first day of October. Also on the launch front, a complete second stage of the Ariane 6 rocket successfully completed a hot fire test. Skyrora had less luck and failed on its first attempt to launch the Skylark L suborbital vehicle.

AE Industrial Partners announced in October that it planned to acquire a majority stake in York Satellite Systems, valuing the satellite bus manufacturer at $1.125B. SatixFy completed its SPAC merger and entered the public markets under the ticker $SATX.

In a stride forward for in-orbit servicing, the US Space Force ordered a GEO satellite refueling mission from Orbit Fab.

Payload’s funding coverage: Solestial, a solar energy startup, raised a $10M seed round. Orbex closed a £40.4M ($46.3M) Series C to scale up development of its Prime rocket. Apex Space emerged from stealth with the announcement of its a16z-led $7.5M seed. Array Labs brought in a $5M seed round to kickstart development of its radar constellation.

November

Congress said farewell to several key space advocates in the US midterms, but fresh faces are waiting in the wings. “I am encouraged that we will continue to have leaders in Congress to sustain a strong US space program,” outgoing Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson told Payload. Elsewhere in policyland, the FCC announced that it would create a space bureau to handle satellite licensing. Later in the month, the White House released its first national strategy for cislunar science and technology.

The X37-B spaceplane returned to Earth after 908 days in orbit. In the South China Sea, China seized a piece of space debris from a Long March launch that had been recovered by the Filipino navy.

On Nov. 16, NASA finally launched Artemis I, successfully deploying the Orion capsule on its trajectory around the Moon and beginning its campaign to send humanity back to the lunar surface. And, while we’re here…the White House dropped its first report on US cislunar S&T strategy.

In Europe, ESA announced its newest class of astronaut candidates and the agency came away from its ministerial council meeting with a 17% funding boost for the next three years.

Payload’s funding coverage: Wyvern secured $7M to develop telescopic hyperspectral satellites, Gravitics emerged from stealth with a $20M round to work on the StarMax module, Rosotics raised a $750,000 pre-seed to build really large 3D printers, and SynMax closed a $6M seed round to built verticalized satellite data analytics solutions for the O&G sector.

December

The Pentagon took aim at the “valley of death” for deep-tech startups by creating the Office of Strategic Capital. Lawmakers ushered the 2023 NDAA through rounds of revision and left it on the President’s desk (the bill is expected to be signed this week). In the executive branch, the FCC expressed its intent to streamline the satellite licensing approval process.

Orion splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after 25 days, bringing Artemis I to a triumphant close.

Maxar ($MAXR) and Aerojet Rocketdyne ($AJRD) each agreed to $6.4B and $4.7B mergers, respectively.

Payload’s funding coverage: Slingshot raised a $40M Series A-2, Dawn snagged NZ$20M (~$13M), and Quantum Space bagged $15M from Prime Movers Lab.

A Lump of Coal for Christmas at Arianespace

The first operational flight of the Vega C rocket has ended in failure, resulting in the loss of a pair of Airbus Pléiades Neo imaging satellites.

What happened? The rocket lifted off at 8:47pm ET from Kourou. The flight started off well, with the first stage completing its leg of the mission and separating successfully. However, approximately three and a half minutes into the flight, the rocket’s trajectory appeared to deviate from the planned flight path.

According to a statement from Arianespace, the anomaly occurred 2 minutes and 27 seconds after liftoff, just seconds after ignition of the second stage. The Zefiro 40 second stage was a new introduction for Vega C, and an upgrade from the previous iteration’s Zefiro 23 solid fuel motor. It’s currently unclear what caused the anomaly following the ignition of Zefiro 40 second stage.

The rocky road so far

After the first Vega failure in July 2019, it took Avio and Arianespace almost 14 months to return the vehicle to flight.

The root cause of the July 2019 failure was never identified publicly, but it was generally understood that the solution required some kind of hardware redesign. The second failure in November 2020 had Vega on the bench for just over five months. The cause of that failure, however, was identified as human error: a technician reportedly installed cables for the vehicle’s control system incorrectly.

Yesterday’s flight didn’t come without warnings, either. The mission was delayed on Nov. 25 after pyrotechnics in the payload fairing separation system were found to be defective. This could potentially add an additional element to the vehicle’s road back to the launchpad.

The worst news possible: Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, Arianespace made the decision to stop utilizing Soyuz to launch medium-lift missions from Kourou. This left several payloads without a launch vehicle.

In late October, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher revealed that the maiden flight of Ariane 6 would be pushed from late 2022 to late 2023. The vehicle was supposed to be debuted before the retirement of Ariane 5, with the vehicle’s final two flights expected to occur in early 2023.

With Vega C now out of commission while a post-failure investigation gets underway, and no launch startups expected to enter the market anytime before late 2023, Europe’s launch capacities have all but disappeared. 2023 could, as a result, be a quiet year for Arianespace and European launch.

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Did you miss our live webinar on lunar communications with CesiumAstro? If so, good news. We recorded the full thing and you can watch it at your leisure using the link below.

In Other News

• SpaceX and Kyiv reached a deal that will see 10,000+ additional Starlink terminals shipped to Ukraine, Bloomberg reports.

• The Outer Space Institute published an open letter calling for an international, multilateral controlled reentry agreement, starting with rocket bodies.

• InSight isn’t responding to communications from Earth, and according to NASA, “it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations.”

• JAXA says the surface of Ryugu was likely dehydrated from “space weathering.” The Japanese space agency returned samples from the asteroid in 2020.

• Starship is getting closer and closer to a first orbital launch attempt. The super-heavy rocket is expected to produce ~17M lbs. of thrust (vs. the 9.5M generated by SLS).

Payload Insights