That's smart (8/4/2022)

Good morning. It’s a glorious day for launch buffs. Rocket Lab launched the second of its back-to-back missions for the National Reconnaissance Office at 1am Eastern and ULA launched a Space Force satellite at 6:29.

Blue Origin, meanwhile, will launch a crew of six to suborbital space in roughly half an hour. To close out the day, SpaceX will launch the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter on a Falcon 9 at 7:08pm.

Pour one out for anyone who tries to stay awake and watch all four launches.

In today's newsletter:🗺️ Xona fundraise📡 Isotropic -> All.Space📝 The contract report

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Xona's New Round

Xona Space Systems, a San Mateo, CA-based startup building a GPS alternative in LEO, has raised an funding round. First Spark Ventures led the round, with participation from a range of new and existing investors, including Lockheed Martin Ventures. 

Xona now raised $25M+ to date, putting this round somewhere around $15M based on previous fundraising reports.

A GNSS constellation for LEO: Xona is singularly focused on building a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) in LEO. Its planned constellation, Pulsar, is meant to be a GPS replacement tailored to modern needs and built more cheaply and flexibly than the heritage system in MEO.

“GPS was designed in the ‘70s by the Air Force for the Air Force,” Bryan Chan, Xona cofounder and VP of business development, told Payload. “It really was at a time when cell phones didn't exist [and] self-driving cars were not even a thing that people thought about. And it's almost by chance that civilians, people like us, are actually allowed to use GPS service.”

Tons of applications today need high-precision positioning data down to the centimeter level, such as precision agriculture, sensor-enabled construction machines, and autonomous vehicles. Xona aims to field 300 satellites for Pulsar and provide that much-needed precision.

Xona is building its constellation with three main features in mind:

1. Precision. GPS can get down to a meter resolution. Pulsar is intended to get down to the centimeter level to meet high-precision needs.

2. Security. “Our system adds a layer of security on that, both encryption and authentication,” said Chan. “All of a sudden that unlocks a lot of critical use cases.” 

3. Availability. While GPS signals often break in dense urban areas or even under tree cover, Chan said, Pulsar is designed to have a more powerful signal that can provide reliable coverage in these areas.

Testing it out: Xona is deploying a pair of test payloads, Huginn and Muginn, named for the mythological pair of ravens who deliver information to Odin. 

• The Huginn craft launched in May on Transporter-5 and is still undergoing commissioning. The company reports that all systems are healthy so far.

• Muginn’s launch is planned for 2023. The second test mission will be structurally identical to Huginn.

Hiring and scaling: With this new round of funding, Xona is ramping up hiring across the board, in engineering, software, ground systems, marketing, and product development. The company is also moving into a new facility in Burlingame, CA, where it will be able to bring more technology testing in-house.

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Isotropic Gets a Fresh Coat of Paint

Reading-based Isotropic Systems has gotten a rebrand. The UK antenna manufacturer, now known as All.Space, also has new product details to share. 

All.Space has unveiled its 5th-gen “smart terminal,” which is slated for release before the year is out. Once units start shipping, capacity will be booked out for at least nine months, thanks to a sizable order backlog.

Refresher: All.Space has developed—and successfully field-tested—a multi-beam, multi-link, and all-orbit satellite terminal. It’s capable of connecting to multiple constellations, with 3G–5G “plug-and-play” options.

“It is the Swiss army knife of service enablement because it allows service providers or end users or operators to tell their own story, to define their own space,” All.Space CEO John Finney told Payload. “We just give them the optionality and flexibility to do that.”

Head here for our deeper dive into the underlying technology.  

All.Space recently concluded a series of live field tests with several satellite operators in addition to US and UK governmental customers. The terminal demonstrated multiple, simultaneous connections across LEO, MEO, and GEO orbits.

Why rebrand? “Isotropic is a scientific term. It was meant to describe a particular feature of our optics,” said Finney. “As we've evolved with the ability to connect all cellular and all satellite across all orbits at once, the company deserves a name that represents the global applicability of our technology.”

What’s next? All.Space is continuing to scale headcount. In order to meet demand for its product, the startup is scouting out a location for its second factory. Beyond the extra production capacity, the new factory will enable All.Space to expand its customer base from defense all the way down to rail and coach.

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Sponsored

Get To Know BlackSky

BlackSky will be attending the SmallSat Conference from August 6th 'till 11th in Logan, UT. 

Click the button below to learn more about BlackSky or request a meeting with them at SmallSat.

In Other News

• Australia’s space agency confirmed that three articles of space debris recently discovered by a sheep farmer are linked with SpaceX. Side note: We learned from this story that SpaceX has a debris recovery hotline. 

• POTUS plans to sign the CHIPS and Science act into law on Tuesday in the Rose Garden.

• Skyrora has submitted an application for a launch operator license from the UK Civil Aviation Authority.

• ULA launched the SBIRS GEO-6 mission this morning on an Atlas V from Cape Canaveral.

• Rocket Lab launched its “Antipodean Adventure” mission, carrying the NROL-199 satellite to orbit for the NRO and Australian DoD.

• China launched a carbon-monitoring EO satellite and two other birds on a Long March 4B late Wednesday night.

• The grandson of Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden is working to restore the AstroVette, one of three modified Corvettes leased by the 1971 crew.

🚨 Payload Pod Appearance 🚨

Payload’s staff reporter Rachael Zisk went on the Billion Moonshots podcast last week to talk about all things Payload and JWST. In the hour-long pod, Rachael and host Prashant Bagga geek out over JWST’s first images, the engineering feats and possibilities for astronomy, and (spoiler alert!) a new Payload science newsletter on the horizon.

Listen to the pod on Spotify or YouTube. 

The View from Space

This is Shaun, the beloved stop-motion sheep from a European animated TV series and soon-to-be first ESA “astronaut” to travel to the Moon. A plush doll of Shaun will fly to space on Artemis I, ESA announced this week.  

“This is an exciting time for Shaun and for us at ESA. We’re woolly very happy that he’s been selected for the mission and we understand that, although it might be a small step for a human, it’s a giant leap for lambkind,” said ESA’s David Parker.

If anyone can make an intro to Shaun, please slide into our DMs. We’d love to book him as a guest on Pathfinder.