Sweep up (2/28/23)

Good morning. Tomorrow will be edition #333 of the daily Payload newsletter. To mark the occasion, we thought it’d be fitting to open up a bit and answer some questions from you. Reply to this email with questions you’d want to ask the Payload team and we’ll answer a few of them in tomorrow’s newsletter.

Today’s newsletter: 💸 Astroscale’s big raise 🎙️ Pathfinder #0037 with Spire🔁 People on the move

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Astroscale Brings In $76M

Astroscale, a Japanese startup designing orbital debris removal and on-orbit servicing technology, announced Sunday that it has closed a $76M Series G round to accelerate its growth and development. The round, especially notable given the current state of private markets, brings Astroscale’s total funding to date to $376M.

The company raised the Series G entirely from new investors, including Mitsubishi Electric, Yusaku Maezawa, Mitsubishi UFJ Bank, Mitsubishi Corporation, Development Bank of Japan, and FEL Corporation.

• Mitsubishi Electric pitched in $25M and, separately, announced that it will collaborate with Astroscale to build more sustainable satellite buses.

• Yusaku Maezawa contributed $23M personally. The Japanese billionaire/space fanatic is known for being the first private citizen from Japan to visit the ISS.

• He’s also spearheading the dearMoon mission, which will take Maezawa, Steve Aoki, The Everyday Astronaut, and six additional artists/creatives on an around-the-Moon adventure aboard Starship.

“This investment is just another step toward…developing the technologies and toward driving the policies that make this a viable sector,” Chris Blackerby, COO of Astroscale, told Payload. “It takes time, it takes patience to get to the point of developing an entirely new ecosystem in space.”

The growing debris problem

As the world prepares to launch potentially tens of thousands of satellites into LEO in the coming decade, the need for effective space debris management is becoming increasingly obvious.

Astroscale’s approach: By building spacecraft that can dock with stray satellites and deorbit them, Astroscale believes that it can make the orbital environment safer for everyone involved.

The company launched its first demonstration mission, ELSA-d, in 2021. ELSA-d is short for End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration. Last year, ELSA-d successfully completed a docking maneuver with a client spacecraft.

• ELSA-d lost a few thrusters in the process, but Astroscale is still planning to complete the demonstration with a controlled deorbit, Blackerby said.

Astroscale has several debris removal demonstrations on the books with JAXA, ESA, the UK Space Agency, and multiple private firms. Astroscale intends to launch a small craft with Rocket Lab early this year to observe a spent Japanese H2-A stage (which will eventually be deorbited). The company also has the ELSA-M follow-up mission to ELSA-d slated for 2024.

And Astroscale isn’t stopping with debris removal. “We see that the technologies that we're developing that we initially were developing for debris removal are all quite applicable to the wider range of servicing writ large,” Blackerby said.

Buddying up: Mitsubishi Electric and Astroscale will also collab on designing, building, and launching more sustainable satellite buses. They’ll ship with Astroscale-designed magnetic docking plates, so that a servicer spacecraft can easily rendezvous with spent or misbehaving satellites and either service them or send them down into Earth’s atmosphere for a fiery demise.

What’s next? With the Series G complete, Astroscale plans to ramp up R&D for its upcoming missions; grow its headcount; and scale its UK, US, Israel, and Tokyo facilities. The company has grown 60% to 400+ employees since its $109M Series F in 2021. Blackerby says he is expecting the company to continue to grow significantly in headcount.

Pathfinder #0037, featuring Spire's Joel Spark

In today’s episode, we welcome Joel Spark, cofounder and chief satellite architect at Spire. The “space-to-cloud” data and analytics provider flies a proprietary constellation of 150+ nanosatellites that are constantly collecting and analyzing data from Earth.

• Spire’s data spans weather forecasting, maritime domain awareness, aviation, and more.

• Spire is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and currently has a market cap of ~$150M.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Kepler Communications, a company bringing the internet to space.

A sneak peek

The back half of our conversation focuses on Spire’s “Space Services” play and the concept of space-as-a-service. Before that, though, we explore Joel’s journey into the industry and how he was “spacepilled,” and unpack the mind-blowing fact that Spire began as a KickStarter crowdfunding campaign. Here’s what else you can expect in Pathfinder #0037:

• The 80/20 principle of building complex hardware systems

• The primacy of vertical integration and agile development

• Spire’s Scottish roots and nanosat factory in Glasgow, Scotland

• AIS, ADS-B, and identifying planes and ships at scale

• Why pulling analytics and insights from that data is often more important than the data itself: “Where is the ship going?” “Is the plane flying off course?”

• Applying the tech platform analogy to Spire Space Services

• Our Max Q questions: What happens if a customer goes belly up? How big is the market, really, for hosted payloads?

And there’s a whole lot more where that came from! After tuning in Pathfinder #0037, we’re confident you’ll come away with a comprehensive understanding of the technical tailwinds, operational ethos, and management philosophy that drive Spire.

Listen now...

...on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or desktop. 🚀*

*this is not financial advice.

In Other News

• China revealed initial design concepts for a crew-rated lunar lander. The country’s human spaceflight program intends to land two taikonauts on the lunar surface by 2029.

• SpaceX launched 21 V2 Mini Starlink satellites from Florida last night, and completed its 100th consecutive booster landing.

• Virgin Galactic ($SPCE) successfully completed a second test flight of VMS Eve, its new mothership.

• Egypt launched Horus 1, an EO satellite, from a base in northwest China. China and Egypt collaborated to design and assemble the bird.

• DISH Network was hacked last week, BleepingComputer reports, and remote employees have been cut off from accessing work systems.

• NASA began testing autonomous aerial technology in a simulated environment modeled after Phoenix, Arizona.

• 3D Systems Corp will pay the US up to $27M for illegally exporting military electronics and spacecraft reference designs to China, Reuters reports.

The View from Space

Pixxel released some of the first images from the D2 satellite launched last April. The imagery shows mines, lakes, national parks, and mountain ranges across China, Australia, and Senegal. The Indian-American startup also posted a hyperspectral hype video. High time to get hyped for hyperspectral…