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Lucky #0013 (8/23/22)
Rachael Zisk & Ryan Duffy
August 23, 2022
Good morning. Don’t miss today’s SLS poll. We’re tapping the wisdom of the crowds–aka, the 10,000 of you that make up the Payload hivemind. Let’s hear your predictions and hot takes on how many people will tune in to the Artemis launch.
Today’s newsletter: 🚁 Pathfinder #0013✅ Orbital Reef 🗣️ SLS poll!🔁 On the move
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Pathfinder Lucky #0013 with Giuseppe Santangelo
Today’s Pathfinder takes us back and forth across the Kármán line plenty of times.
Our guest is Giuseppe Santangelo, president at Red Cat Holdings ($RCAT) and founder of Skypersonic. The company develops drones that can be remotely piloted from thousands of miles away, and operated in high-risk, confined, and GPS-denied locations.
Santangelo is no stranger to space. He joined Thales Alenia in 1999, and across the 2000s, developed space hardware for NASA and ESA.
Fun fact: Skypersonic pivoted from hypersonic, suborbital transportation vehicles to drones. Nothing like a good startup pivot story!
In 2021, NASA awarded Skypersonic a five-year contract to provide drone and rover software, hardware, and services/support for a simulated Mars mission.
Martian tests: Skypersonic recently completed a 15-day test of its drone hardware and software at Mt. Etna, an Italian volcano with Martian-esque terrain. Pilots in Houston controlled Skypersonic's drones, validating long-distance, low-latency flight technology (with Starlink terminals) and testing operations in a Mars-like environment.
Sneak peek...
Along with the above topics, Ryan and Giuseppe discuss:
The Italian space industry
How space tech enables drones
Getting acquired by Red Cat
Being on the management team of a publicly traded company
De-risking deeptech business models
Star Wars or Star Trek?
Are we alone in the universe?
So, yeah, just your light Tuesday morning conversation topics. This was a fun one and you don’t want to miss it. Catch Pathfinder #0013 using the links below:
Orbital Reef Gets the Go-Ahead
A rendering of Orbital Reef. Image: Blue Origin
A new space station has moved one step closer to reality. Yesterday, Blue Origin and Sierra Space announced that their Orbital Reef project has passed its system definition review for NASA. The orbital outpost is now ready to enter the design phase.
Orbital Reef 101
The ISS is destined for a watery grave in 2030—or even before that—and NASA is working with space agencies and a handful of industry partners to ensure the US doesn’t lose its sustained access to LEO.
Led by Blue and Sierra, Orbital Reef is one of three space station concepts that NASA has funded through its Commercial LEO Destinations (CLD) program. Amazon Supply Chain, Amazon Web Services, Arizona State University, Boeing, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and Redwire Space are also working on the project.
Space agency funding helps, but doesn’t fully finance the hefty costs of building out a commercial space station.
Since CLD developers have skin in the game, program delays or cost overruns could have a real impact on companies’ ability to remain a going concern.
The planned station is billed as a “mixed-use business park” for research, industry, and tourism. It has a modular design so it can expand to accommodate larger crews. In a major shift from space stations of the past and present, Orbital Reef will be fully owned and operated by the commercial space companies, rather than by NASA.
System definitions: This NASA review falls under the agency’s requirements for the $130M Space Act CLD award the Orbital Reef team received late last year. Now that NASA has verified that Orbital Reef meets the agency’s performance requirements, the design phase can begin.
The timeline: “We start launching the first elements of Orbital Reef in ‘26,” Sierra CEO Tom Vice told us on Pathfinder #0007. “We’ve got about six New Glenn launches, Dream Chasers are taking cargo and crew up, and then we build out the components,” Vice said, with the north star of an on-orbit, fully operational Orbital Reef by 2027.
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Image: NASA
We want to hear from you, Payload Nation. Insiders at NASA say the Artemis I mission will garner tens, if not hundreds, of millions of concurrent viewers across cable broadcasts and social media platforms. For reference, and our American-centric audience, Super Bowl LVI averaged ~112.3M viewers.
So here’s the part you need to answer: How many people will tune in to the Artemis 1 launch livestream? Note on methodology: We’ll be using NASA’s official numbers to determine our final estimate.
In Other News
Artemis I is go for launch on Monday morning. The program managers cleared the mission in a flight readiness review yesterday.
SpaceX announced it will use a combo of Falcon 9 and Starship launches to deploy the next generation of Starlink, after previously saying that Starship would carry the fleet of 30,000 birds to LEO alone.
NASA moved up the launch of its Lunar Trailblazer mission by two years. The lunar satellite mission is now slated to launch in mid-2023.
On the Move
Planet ($PL) promoted former VP of Customer Success Mike Merit to be the company’s first chief customer officer. It also hired Nate Gonzalez as head of product.
ispace US CEO Kyle Acierno announced that he is leaving the company.
Eutelsat hired Richard Mortellaro as its new president and CEO. Mortellaro was previously SVP of sales, marketing and fixed satellite services biz dev activities at EchoStar.
AE Industrial Partners hired Marc Duvall as an operating partner. Previously, Duvall was president of the aerostructures division of Collins Aerospace.
Euroconsult appointed Natalia Larrea as the new director of its US operation. Larrea was previously a principal advisor at Euroconsult Canada.
CesiumAstro added Christopher Meyers as its new director of business development.
Mynaric ($MYNA) hired Mustafa Veziroglu as its new president. Veziroglu was previously COO of SA Photonics, another laser communications company.
Relativity Space added Anthony Valentino to the team as VP of data and enterprise platform engineering.
Astroscale hired Pat Mathewson, former space industry economist at London Economics, as its new head of business analysis.
Stoke Space added Julia Black as director of range operations.
The View from Space
Image: NASA
NASA has identified 13 candidate regions for the Artemis III crewed landing. Each spot is 15km x 15km (or 9.3 miles by 9.3 miles, for our imperial lovers).
“All regions considered are scientifically significant because of their proximity to the lunar South Pole,” per a NASA release, “which is an area that contains permanently shadowed regions rich in resources and in terrain unexplored by humans.” Exciting times ahead...
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