Blue marble (12/7/22)

Happy Wednesday from 37,993 feet above North America. Huge shout out to our space internet provider (we’re not sure which one) for making the send of this newsletter technically possible today.

In today's newsletter:🛫 Dawn raise💸 Term sheet 🌎 Blue Marble

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Dawn Secures the Bag

Kiwi startup Dawn Aerospace announced this week that it’s raised $20M from a group of New Zealand investors to accelerate satellite thruster and spaceplane development.

Icehouse Ventures led the round, writing a $10M+ check to the New Zealand startup. Kiwi investors GD1 and Covac also participated in the round.

Dawn’s press release announcing the news is refreshingly transparent. The key takeaways:

1. This round values Dawn at NZ$170M (~$105M).

2. Dawn’s thrusters can be found on eight operational spacecraft.

3. The company has real revenues and a growing backlog.

Key company details

• Origin story: Dawn was started in 2017, and it’s based in Christchurch, NZ.

• A global affair: Operations are now spread across the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the US.

• Name of the game: Dawn sells turnkey, green propulsion systems to satellite operators. Not content just working on propulsion, Dawn is also developing a reusable spaceplane. Its Mk-II Aurora spaceplane has completed more than 40 flights.

Bootstrap when you can, raise what you must

“We’ve always placed strategic importance on getting to customer revenue—with hardware on orbit—fast,” Dawn cofounder and CFO James Powell said. Most space startups “don’t get anything flying without hundreds of millions in investment.”

Before raising this round, the dollar value of Dawn’s sales exceeded the VC financing it had raised. “With $22M of deals closed in 2022 and another $150M in negotiation,” Powell said, “it won't be long until propulsion sales resume bringing in more cash than VC.”

The company will probably have to wait a bit longer before any sort of spaceplane revenue figures into the equation, though it does expect to begin rocket-powered Mk-II test flights in Q1 ‘23. To date, the spaceplane demonstrator has used jet engines.

Shoot for the stars

Dawn says it will use the fresh $20M in financing to accelerate development of Mk-III, an orbital-class spaceplane, and extend its in-space propulsion products to GEO/lunar orbits and “higher-thrust customers.”

Sponsored 

Pléiades Neo 5 & 6 will be launched on December 20 from French Guiana on a Vega C rocket by Arianespace.

The last two Pléiades Neo satellites will complete the constellation, providing unrivaled access to very-high resolution 30cm optical imagery for geospatial users. Four identical satellites in orbit will provide ultimate reactivity to collect imagery when and where users need visibility and insights on the ground.

Pléiades Neo satellites are entirely funded, manufactured, owned, and operated by Airbus.

Follow us on LinkedIn to get updates or follow the launch progress here:

Democratizing Manufacturing in the Space Industry - What’s Possible?

In Other News

• Blue Origin has put together a new National Team to bid on a second crewed lunar lander mission. The company is also conducting fairing testing at the Cape.

• ispace announced that the HAKUTO-R mission’s new launch window is NET 2:38am ET, Dec. 11 (aka Sunday). The delay is meant to accommodate extra “pre-flight checks” of the Falcon 9, which we’ve been hearing quite a lot recently.

• Virgin Orbit’s ($VORB) historic Spaceport Cornwall mission finally has a date: Dec. 14.

• Pittsburgh is getting its very own space innovation center.

• RFA and DLR announced the winners of the microlauncher payload competition in Berlin. The seven companies will fly payloads on RFA ONE.

• Isar and DLR also announced the 10 organizations that will fly a total of 19 payloads on the launcher’s second flight of its Spectrum rocket.

• Ingenuity flew for the 35th time on Mars and set a new flight height record.

• Relativity is rolling out to the launchpad.

The View from Space

50 years ago today, the Moon-bound Apollo 17 spacecraft snapped this dazzling photo. The “Blue Marble” shot was the first photo to show an entire hemisphere of Earth in one frame, and would go on to become one of the most iconic and widely reproduced images in history.