Rebalancing (6/28/22)

Good morning. We'll be hosting our first Twitter Space tomorrow. The topic? In-space manufacturing (ISM). The roster: a who's who of the ISM world. Find sign-up and participation info below.

In today's newsletter:🛫 VORB → VOBRA📊 Space 3000🏭 ISM Space🔁 On the move

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Coming Soon: More Equatorial Launches

Virgin Orbit has established a Brazilian subsidiary and created a catchy acronym for the entity by rearranging the order of its stock ticker ($VORB) and tacking on one letter. VOBRA, or Virgin Orbit Brasil Ltda., is its name, and launching from the equator is its game.

Brazil has also formally granted Virgin Orbit an operator’s license, a prerequisite for Virgin Orbit to conduct orbital-class missions from the country’s northern coast.

Northern coast?

The Brazilian Air Force (FAB) and AEB, its space agency, are opening up the Alcântara Launch Center to foreign launchers. AEB and Innospace recently announced that the South Korean rocket maker would conduct a suborbital launch from Alcântara in Q4. VORB (or VOBRA, pick your poison) may soon follow suit—and travel a bit farther to LEO.

As we wrote in May, “Alcântara is a crown jewel of a launch site, geographically and strategically speaking, as it’s located on the northern coast of Brazil and just two degrees south of the equator.“

Virgin Orbit would agree, noting Monday that Cosmic Girl will fly “hundreds of miles before releasing the rocket directly above the equator—a global sweet spot—or at other optimal locations identified for each individual mission.”

• LauncherOne is Virgin Orbit's rocket. Cosmic Girl, meanwhile, is the galactically inspired moniker for Virgin’s modified Boeing 747, which serves as LauncherOne’s flying launch platform.

AEB President Carlos Moura noted his agency believes “Virgin Orbit can improve its capacities by taking off from the Alcântara Spaceport. Nice weather, wonderful airfield, free airspace, and proficient tracking systems.”

• “Alcântara does not have a tough schedule,” Moura told Payload in an April interview. “You have a lot of slots that can be used by everybody.”

• “What we are finding is that most of the companies do not need to be in our country for a long time. They want to arrive, use it for a few weeks, and then get out.”

A national first: If all goes to plan, the LauncherOne mission will take flight as early as 2023. Before bearing the distinction of conducting Brazil’s first domestic orbital-class launch, Virgin Orbit and VOBRA must fulfill outstanding “formalities required by the FAB and completion of all CLA guidelines.”

Share this news with a friend in need of a sunny vacation this summer:

It’s Rebalance Time

Space just got added to your retirement accounts. The Russell 3000, an index that benchmarks the US stock market, added several space companies yesterday:

• Astra ($ASTR)

• Momentus ($MNTS)

• Planet ($PL)

• Redwire ($RDW)

• Rocket Lab ($RKLB)

• Spire ($SPIR)

• Terran Orbital ($LLAP)

Spire and Terran Orbital touted their inclusion in the index. “We are honored to be included in the Russell 3000,” said Spire CEO Peter Platzer. “This is a milestone event for the company and for our talented team who got us where we are today.”

Those left out: It wasn’t a good fit for all the pure-play space equities at this time. Players including Virgin Orbit, BlackSky, Satellogic, Mynaric, and Maxar were left out.

Looking forward: Although the immediate effect on stock price varied across the board at market close yesterday, this could help out your favorite struggling space SPACs in the long term by providing more access to capital. Money managers of all types widely use these indices in their strategies, meaning that demand for shares could increase among both investors and funds that benchmark against the index.

About $12T in assets are currently benchmarked to or invested in products based on the Russell US indexes. Becoming part of a passive investment vehicle could lead to more liquidity and demand over time (though, to be fair, these are not normal times).

This also means it may be time for companies that may be dragging their feet on investor relations to bolster their IR bench. The main benefits accrue with staying in the benchmark, not just being listed.

Send this story to all the Russells in your life:

Outer Space x Twitter Spaces, Round 1

Some ~personal~ news: Payload is hosting its first Twitter Space!

Our very own Mo Islam will moderate a Twitter Space on Wednesday at 5pm Eastern (2pm PT) on the future of in-space manufacturing. We have quite the bench of speakers:

• Liz Stein, partner @ Prime Movers Lab

• Jason Dunn, CEO @ Outpost

• Asher Kraut, investor @ Starburst Ventures

• Joshua Western, CEO @ Space Forge

• Noor Ward, CIM @ ISS US National Lab

• Twyman Clements, CEO @ Space Tango

• Case Taylor, investor/writer @ Case Closed

We've gathered many of the key builders to have an informal discussion on the viability and opportunity of this nascent but rapidly advancing vertical. Want to get involved? Here's how:

1. Set a Twitter reminder for this event and add it to your calendar by clicking here.

2. You can also do so via the embedded tweet below. If you plan on tuning in, consider tossing us a RT to help spread the word. And if you have any Qs you'd like Mo to ask the speakers, reply to the thread on Twitter.

In Other News

• CAPSTONE, NASA’s pathfinding mission for a unique orbit around the Moon that will be used later on for the Gateway lunar station, launched on an Electron rocket from New Zealand this morning.

• At the G7, Washington and allies unveiled a $600B infrastructure plan to counterbalance Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative. The US will kick in $200B in grants, federal funds, and private investment over five years, per Reuters, while the EU will mobilize €300B ($317.3B).

• Starlink RV is the harbinger of “space internet to go,” bringing speedy broadband to “overlanders and vanlifers,” The Verge writes in its review of the new SpaceX product.

• Supercluster launched Space Agency, a full-service creative studio for the space sector.

The View from Launch Complex 1