Payload 3/10/22 Newsletter

Good morning. Space isn’t the only frontier where great discoveries and adventures await. Putting on our marine archaeologist hats, briefly, we just wanted to give a huge shout-out to the Antarctic adventurers who discovered Ernest Shackleton’s sunken ship, lost since 1915.

Today’s newsletter: 🌍 Slingshot Series A-1💸 The contract report

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Slingshot Raises Series A-1

Slingshot Aerospace, an Austin-based space situational awareness company, has raised a $25M Series A-1, co-led by Draper Associates and ATX Venture Partners. 

• Edison Partners, Embedded Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, and Lockheed Martin Ventures also participated in the round. 

• The company had raised a $9.6M Series A in October 2020, which brings the total Series A and A-1 fundraising to $34.6M, and the total fundraising to date to $42M.

Slingshot 101

“Slingshot is singularly focused on space sustainability,” Melanie Stricklan, CEO of Slingshot, told Payload. Slingshot is aiming to make sure space remains accessible through space situational awareness tracking to mitigate the risks facing governments and companies operating in Earth orbit.

 Those risks, according to Stricklan:

1. Exponential growth in launches, satellites and megaconstellations

2. Uncontrolled space debris

3. Crowded spectrum environment

4. Aggressive geopolitical behavior on orbit

5. Coverage gaps between providers using different models

“The vast majority of investment is going into more hardware, more rockets, more satellites, more components,” said Stricklan. “Now, it’s time for a digital revolution when it comes to removing that uncertainty and reducing risk on orbit to preserve those assets that are so vital to our way of life today.”

Building Beacon

Slingshot Beacon is the company’s collision avoidance and communications platform, where government, commercial, and civil users can cross-coordinate to manage on-orbit assets. The company rolled out Beacon in beta in August, which contains data from 60% of companies operating in LEO, and is working towards a full-scale product launch.

Beacon promises to make collision avoidance simpler for companies and organizations that are inundated daily with data messages, Stricklan said. “Beacon provides a more accurate and efficient way to sift through the noise and only focus on things that really need a maneuver. This helps us reduce the number of maneuvers that our customers do, and it helps them optimize their space systems on orbit.”

Hiring and scaling: Slingshot announced plans to boost headcount by 40 over the coming year. The hiring push will be concentrated on building out the leadership, data science, and astro teams, as the company focuses on both expanding globally and building out the “technical heart” of the product, Stricklan said.

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In Other News

• Relativity is shipping Terran 1’s second stage from Long Beach to NASA Stennis in Mississippi. 🎵on the road again🎵

• Voters in Camden County, GA, struck down a proposed spaceport in a referendum conducted Tuesday. “Camden County officials who spent a decade and $10.3 million pursuing the spaceport seemed determined to fight on in court,” NPR writes, and are asking the Georgia Court of Appeals to prohibit certifying the vote. 

• NASA would net $24B in 2022 funding if the new omnibus spending bill put forth by congressional appropriators passes. That’d be a 3.3% YoY increase, but $760M less than the agency requested.

• Go deeper: The Planetary Society has an excellent breakdown of NASA’s FY 2022 presidential budget request. Head here for a visualization of NASA appropriations over the years, adjusted for inflation. 

• MyRadar, a weather and environmental awareness app, has secured an FCC license to launch a batch of prototype satellites from New Zealand on an Electron rocket in April. 

• Ukraine received another shipment of Starlink terminals.

• Satellogic will launch five satellites on the SpaceX Transporter-4 mission, including the first next-generation Mark V satellite.

The Contract Report

• USSF has awarded General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems Group a follow-on contract option to deliver an Electro-Optical Infrared (EO/IR) Weather System (EWS) satellite. The EWS satellite is set to launch in 2024.

• Spire Global and SNC are partnering on a space services program aimed at radiofrequency collection and analysis.

• Apogee Semiconductor and microelectronics provider Micross have partnered to created radiation-hardened integrated circuits for space and defense applications. 

• Motiv and subcontractor Blue Origin won a DIU contract to build ModuLink, a “robotics applique” that can be installed on spacecraft to support on-orbit servicing.

• Astroscale won an €800,000 ESA contract to lead a collision avoidance study.

The View from a Time Machine