One-stop shop (8/10/23)

Good morning. Readers, please join us in wishing a very happy birthday to Jack Kuhr, Payload’s research director. 🎂 

Today’s newsletter:
⏳ Epsilon3’s new offerings
💻 Quindar x AFWERX
📝 The contract report

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Epsilon3 Unveils Three New Products

Space software company Epsilon3 is rolling out a suite of three additional products to help customers better manage their missions from clean room to orbit, the company's COO told Payload.

The backstory: The CA-based startup, which was founded in 2021, builds software that aims to make the complex operations and workflows typically associated with space missions a little simpler and more organized. Epsilon3 wanted to expand its offerings, so it surveyed its growing roster of customers about what new products they wanted to see, and the results of that are hitting the market now, said COO Max Mednik.

What’s new: Epsilon3 has worked with end users to build three new tools that will become available to customers over the next month.

• A product to track the manufacturing process, including hardware assembly, spare parts, and inventory.

• A timeline tool that will allow companies to manage schedules and future deadlines for projects.

• A way to store large amounts of data and analyze it.

“We kept hearing that people wanted a one stop shop. They didn’t want to have five different tools, they wanted it to all be in one place,” Mednik said. “People would choose a more well-rounded solution because they didn’t want a bunch of parts, [but]…we don’t want people choosing worse software because it does more stuff.”

What’s next: The company is working on other improvements based on other customer priorities as highlighted in their survey, Mednik said.

• More integration of AI and machine learning for things like spotting anomalies.

• Flight testing tech for space companies that could also be used by airplane manufacturers.

• More automated operations for fleets of satellites, while keeping a person in the loop.

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Quindar Wins $1.2M AFWERX Contract

Quindar, a startup building a software platform for satellite constellation mission analysis, testing, and operations, announced this morning that it has won a $1.2M Direct-to-Phase II contract from the US Air Force.

Under the contract, granted through AFWERX, USAF’s innovation arm, Quindar will focus on automating constellation operations across multiple missions.

Quindar 101: The startup’s six technical cofounders hail from OneWeb, where they worked on building the tools to operate the constellation in orbit. The platform they’ve built with Quindar aims to abstract out the complexity of managing constellations, from designing orbits and testing satellites to downlinking and automating tasks.

The contract: This is the company’s first break into the Department of the Air Force, and begins its integrations with USAF operations. Quindar will leverage its mission management platform to meet USAF’s automation goals under the contract.

“We aim to seamlessly blend multiple US Air Force missions into a single operational interface through our Mission Management as a Service," Quindar CEO Nate Hamet said in a statement.

See You Next Week!

Join the Payload team with Bank of America, Deloitte, Flow Engineering, and Velo3D for our upcoming space industry happy hour. Scheduled from 5-8pm following Velo3D’s roadshow, this is an evening of networking you won’t want to miss!

In Other News

• HawkEye 360’s Cluster 4 satellites are losing altitude faster than anticipated.

• BlackSky ($BKSY) bought five additional Electron launches for its Gen-3 EO satellites.

• Interstellar, a Japanese launch startup, hopes to nail an orbital launch by 2025.

• Blue Origin was profiled in a WSJ article as it builds New Glenn and looks to compete with SpaceX.

The View from Space

The Aerospace Corporation’s Moonlighter sat, which is playing an integral role in the upcoming Hack-a-Sat competition, sent back one of its first images of Valencia, Spain.