Stay ahead (8/31/22)

Good morning. Globalstar’s stock ($GSAT) is up ~41% this month, amid rumors of an iPhone 14 satellite integration for emergency services. Nothingburger or well-placed rumor? We’ll know next Wednesday, when Apple holds its “Far Out” iPhone product update event. 

Separately, mark your calendars: Saturday, 9/3/22 @ 2:17pm ET is the date for Artemis I’s next launch attempt. 

Today’s newsletter: 🚀 Ursa Major contract🛰️ Lynk Q&A💸 The term sheet

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Ursa Major Wins USAF Contract

The US Air Force is tapping Ursa Major for rocket engines. The Colorado-based propulsion company has signed a $3.6M contract under USAF’s TACFI (Tactical Funding Increase) program to supply a flight-qualified, oxygen-rich staged combustion (ORSC) Hadley engine. 

The contract, Ursa Major CEO Joe Laurienti told Payload, is the first of its kind in propulsion. 

“More than anything, the scope of this contract is to take our Hadley engine that we have internally developed, we've really built to fit the marketplace, and qualify it in a means that fits Air Force specifications,” Laurienti said. 

Engines only: Ursa Major is bucking the trend of vertical integration to focus singularly on propulsion. Its current core product, Hadley, is a 3D printed ORSC engine capable of providing 5,000 lbs of thrust, with applications in launch, hypersonics, and in-space propulsion.

About a dozen Hadley engines have already been shipped, Laurienti said, including five in July alone. Ursa Major is targeting 30 shipments by the end of 2022. The team expects to double that number next year, said Laurienti, “and that still doesn't meet the demand that we're seeing.” 

While Ursa Major’s production rate fluctuates based on its testing schedule, Hadley engines are rolling off the line at a rate of just under one a week. 

• The acceptance testing schedule is pretty packed, too. The company recently tracked 50,000 total seconds of engine runtime and 1,600 individual tests.

“If you look at the year over year curves, every year our testing cadence grows dramatically,” said Laurienti. “And this year is no exception, with a huge amount of acceptance testing prior to customer shipments.” 

Ursa Major has two other engines coming down the pike:

• Ripley, a LOX and kerosene engine that will provide 50,000lbs of thrust at sea level for LEO and GEO launches. 

• Arroway, a LOX and methane propelled engine that will provide 200,000lbs of thrust at sea level for medium- and heavy-lift rockets.

Ramping up: Ursa Major has its focus trained on growth. It’s been expanding the team dramatically and currently employs a workforce of ~250. For reference, the company signed its 200th employee in April and had about 125 back in December. 

Share this story if you can pick out the space movie references:

Let’s Hear from Lynk 

If you thought that T-Mobile and SpaceX’s Thursday announcement would scare the H-E-🏒🏒 out of other players working on direct-to-phone connectivity from space, think again. 

AST SpaceMobile ($ASTS) executives welcomed the extra attention on their business brought by the T-Mobile/SpaceX technology partnership. So too did Lynk Global, a Virginia startup putting “cell towers in space” that has successfully demonstrated two-way links with thousands of devices.  

In an interview, Lynk CEO Charles Miller stressed that SpaceX’s interest in direct-to-phone services validated his startup’s raison d'etre. We’ve included a few snippets below. 

1. Big TAM: “No one questions that this will be a really big business anymore, and the biggest category of satellite or space service.”

2. Out in front: “We are the category creator and we're years ahead of everybody else. Our job is to stay ahead.”

3. Separate strategies: “We are completely different from SpaceX...Lynk will never go satellite direct-to-consumer, on a retail basis. We’ll partner with mobile network operators.”

Click here to read the full Q+A. In it, you’ll find a one-month-old easter egg spotted by Miller (and Payload), indicating Starlink was preparing to make a mobile play. 

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In Other News

• Starlink suffered an outage on Monday night, per PCMag.

• JPL and NASA engineers fixed a glitch associated with Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system. 

• AT&T’s CEO told Axios that the space-based connectivity market will develop with a “variety of different alternatives and solutions." What does the US telco have up its sleeves? 

• Royal Caribbean will add Starlink service across its entire fleet of ocean liners. 

• SpaceX launched its 39th mission of 2022 last night.

• Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, died yesterday in Moscow at 91.

The View from Space

A Maxar satellite snapped shots of Burning Man, “a full-fledged, thriving temporary metropolis” in  in Black Rock City, NV. The iconoclastic desert arts festival is back after a two-year hiatus, attracting free spirits from all over. If investors aren’t returning your calls, this may be why: