Moment's notice (7/7/22)

Happy Thursday. Today is a rather momentous day in space history. On this day in 2003, NASA launched the Mars Exploration Rover–B (MER-B, aka Opportunity) to space aboard a Delta II rocket.

While Opportunity had a planned 90-day mission, it kept on kickin’ and explored the Martian surface for 15 years. Talk about perseverance…

In today's newsletter:💫 Stellar Ventures🚀 New motherships📝 The contract report

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A Star Fund Is Born

There’s a new space technology specialist fund in town. Today, Stellar Ventures announced the close of $23M in committed capital for SV Andromeda Fund LP, its first fund.

Stellar Ventures may ring a bell for seasoned space hands. It sounds like Stellar Solutions, an aerospace engineering company, and that’s no coincidence. Celeste Ford started both (Stellar Solutions est. 1995, Stellar Ventures earlier this year). She’ll be deploying capital alongside managing director Matt Patterson and operating partner David Anderman.

Anderman told Payload that the trio “kicked it off in earnest last summer,” with much of the capital raise occurring in the last six months or so. Not bad for first-time fund managers…and in this economy? “We feel fortunate to actually have some dry powder to deploy in this market,” Anderman said.

Anderman was formerly COO and general counsel at Lucasfilm, where he oversaw the company’s sale to Disney in 2012. After stints in VR and at various startups, he cold-emailed Elon Musk and eventually landed the GC position at SpaceX, where he worked on launching Starlink.

“I went from fictional space to real space,” Anderman said.

The ABCs of Andromeda

The fund is focused on seed and early-stage teams building constellations, laser links, software stacks, edge computing solutions, positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services, and space communications products.

• Existing portcos: The fund has already backed Xona Space Systems, Skyloom, Firehawk, Airflow, SatelliteVu, Cosmic Shielding Corporation, Corvus Robotics, ShadowBreak Intl, and BreachBits (per its website).

• Founders of focus: “I’ve never seen any other company work as quickly as SpaceX does,” Anderman said. With a nod to the SpaceX mafia, he noted that “there’s a whole group of entrepreneurs that come out of that company and are starting a whole series of other startups.”

• A distinctive edge: Ford’s background “gives us unparalleled deal flow and due diligence opportunities,” Anderman said. As the new VCs note in a statement, Stellar Solutions has access to former astronauts, admirals, generals, and engineering whizzes aplenty.

Closing thoughts? Like others in the industry, the Stellar Ventures team compares the current state of space to the early internet days. “At some point, people are going to come up with crazy ideas that we’ve never even thought of,” Anderman said. “Unbelievable ideas that are just…literally going back to science fiction, going back to my roots, right?”

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Next-Gen Motherships

Virgin Galactic ($SPCE) has selected Aurora Flight Sciences to build its next generation of motherships. The Boeing ($BA) subsidiary will build two motherships for Virgin, the human spaceflight company said Wednesday. $SPCE rose over 5% in after-hours trading.

Terminology first: The mothership carries and air-launches Virgin’s spaceship at a release altitude of ~50,000 feet.

The deal: Aurora will partner with Virgin to design and manufacture two ships, planning that each will enter service in 2025 and support 200 launches a year. No contract value was announced but it contains a mix of fixed-price and time-and-materials task orders with incentives for staying on time and budget, according to an SEC filing.

The why: “Our next generation motherships are integral to scaling our operations,” Virgin CEO Michael Colglazier said, as “they will be faster to produce, easier to maintain, and will allow us to fly substantially more missions each year.”

The new ships couldn’t come soon enough. VMS Eve, Virgin’s existing mothership, is showing its age and undergoing refurbishment. And as Colglazier suggests, Eve isn’t capable of flying at a cadence that will let Virgin begin making a dent in its 750+ person waitlist.

Payload’s takeaway: Aurora brings 30+ years of complex aircraft manufacturing experience. Virgin Galactic’s manufacturing strategy stands in contrast to its human spaceflight frenemies, as it more heavily taps third party suppliers. Scaled Composites, for example, built VMS Eve.

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Small Sat Conference Is Near

The 36th Annual Small Satellite Conference will explore the realm of the possible and investigate key advancements for small satellite missions to truly become transformational scientific discovery tools beyond low Earth orbit.

The conference is less than two months away so don't sleep on registration. See you in Utah.

In Other News

• CAPSTONE re-established communications with mission operators. “The spacecraft is looking happy and healthy,” per Advanced Space. 🎉🎉🎉

• SpaceX is targeting 9:11am ET this morning for yet another launch of a Starlink batch. The mission will be the 13th flight for the Falcon 9’s first stage.

• Houston, look alive! NASA Johnson will conduct a pressure test Saturday that will produce a loud boom sometime between 11am and 12pm Central. Engineers will be testing the max pressure at which an inflatable lunar habitat prototype will burst.

• The FAA told WaPo’s Christian Davenport that it will make a Starship orbital launch “license determination only after SpaceX provides all outstanding information and the agency can fully analyze it.”

• Rocket Lab ($RKLB) created a responsive space program that will give customers “rapid, 24-hour call up launch service and rapid satellite build capability.”

• Blue Origin is opening a new engineering center in Reston, VA, per the Washington Business Journal.

The View from Space

Synspective Inc. released these images of Brasilia, Brazil; Manila, the Philippines; and Rotterdam, the Netherlands this week. They’re the first images taken by StriX-β, the Japanese company’s second demo synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite. StriX-β launched on a Rocket Lab Electron earlier this year.

Synspective plans to launch its first commercial prototype StriX-1 satellite later this year, and three more in 2023. The company aims to deploy a 30 satellite-strong SAR constellation by 2026.