Into the deep (8/12/22)

Good morning, and happy Friday. The Payload team has safely journeyed home from SmallSat. We loved seeing so many of your smiling faces in Utah over the past week.

In today's newsletter:🚀 $RKLB earnings🚚 Pro traffic management📖 Weekend reads

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Rocket Lab Reports Q2 2022 Earnings 

Rocket Lab ($RKLB) reported earnings at market close on Thursday. The New Zealand-based launch company recorded a quarterly record revenue of $55.5M, up 392% YoY. 

Key Rocket Lab Q2 2022 #s

• Adj. EBITDA = -$8.5M

• Cash & cash equivalents = $542.5M 

• Backlog = $531.4M

• Net loss = $37.4M

Revenue By Segment

• Space Systems = $36.4M

• Launch Services $19.1M 

“We are encouraged by broad-based momentum that continued across our space systems business which comprised 66% of our revenue in the second quarter. Space Systems continues to be a significant growth area, with construction of our satellite constellation production facility in Long Beach substantially complete,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in the investor update.  

Q2 Developments

Rocket Lab launched three successful Electron missions this quarter delivering a total of 37 satellites, including CAPSTONE, a lunar pathfinding mission for Artemis. The launcher also deployed satellites for BlackSky, Unseenlabs, E-Space, and Swarm, three of which are repeat customers, and struck a deal with HawkEye 360 to launch 15 satellites over the next two years. 

Rocket Lab’s first mid-air catch attempt (then immediate loss) of an Electron booster with a helicopter stood out as a point of pride, despite dropping the booster after making contact.

In Q2, Rocket Lab broke ground on its new Neutron launch vehicle production complex in Virginia. The 250,000 sq. ft facility will support Neutron production, assembly, and integration and include a launchpad. 

Peter Beck at SmallSat 

CEO Peter Beck commented on deep space economics and reusability during his keynote at the SmallSat conference in Logan, Utah earlier this week. 

Beck credited CAPSTONE for pushing the company to expand its spacecraft capabilities. “What we intended to do with the Lunar Photon spacecraft is to really lower the barrier for interplanetary missions,” he said. “The biggest thing that came out of that was there’s a spacecraft now that, for some tens of millions of dollars, that you can buy and go and visit an asteroid, go and visit the moon, go and visit another planet. That’s never existed before.”

He was also confident that reusability will be a permanent fixture in Rocket Lab’s capabilities. “The biggest learning from the last one is that it is going to work,” he remarked.

Fun Fact: The company said the upper stage from NASA’s CAPSTONE mission is “now touring the solar system” at a distance of 1.3 million km away. 

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Keeping it Clean

Earlier this week, space safety company Kayhan Space launched the next tier of its space traffic management (STM) platform, Pathfinder Pro. 

Kayhan’s ultimate goal is to fully automate all collision avoidance maneuvers in orbit, cofounder and CTO Araz Feyzi told Payload. LEO, in particular, is poised to get a lot more crowded over the coming decade, and the space domain environment needs more transparency and collaboration from satellite operators if we are to keep Earth orbit as debris-free as possible. “Otherwise, you can throw the whole system into chaos very easily,” Feyzi said.

Pathfinder Pro: The newest tier of Kayhan’s STM platform allows satellite operators with no onboard propulsion at all to determine available collision avoidance maneuvers. Altering a satellite’s cross-section (often by adjusting its solar panels) or attitude changes its drag profile. With enough warning, operators can use this to adjust orbits and lower collision risk.

The platform’s features also include:

• Automated collision risk assessment

• Generated maneuver options

• Tertiary collision risk (aka additional potential collisions that arise after making a maneuver)

Kayhan has already secured Capella Space, Globalstar, and Lynk Global as customers for its new platform. Feyzi says that the Essentials tier of its platform has more than a dozen users.

Paired for launch: Kayhan unveiled two other products for space safety:

1. Eagle, which quickly propagates out a satellite’s orbit 14 days in advance

2. Gamut, which provides collision risk data for each stage of a launch

Right now, satellite operators are still solidly in the loop when it comes to deciding when and how to maneuver a satellite. In the future, Kayhan hopes to build a sophisticated enough STM product with enough trust and heritage to remove nearly all possibility for human error.

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In Other News

• NASA transferred ownership and operations of the Landsat 9 EO satellite to the US Geological Survey.

• Momentus ($MNTS) reported its Q2 2022 results. The orbital tug company booked $50,000 in revenue and net losses of $22.9M.

• Terran Orbital ($LLAP) reported $21.4M in Q2 revenue, a 127% jump YoY, and ended the quarter with $62.3M cash on hand. (via Payload)

• CAPSTONE was selected as Small Satellite Mission of the Year by the AIAA small satellite technical committee.

• Spaceflight shipped its orbital tug, Sherpa-LTC2, to Cape Canaveral for a SpaceX launch sometime this fall.

The View from Space

It’s been a month since JWST’s first images were released, and we’re still left in awe with each new photo drop. This image of the Cartwheel Galaxy was taken with the telescope’s MIRI instrument, which peers further into the infrared spectrum and is better at making out hydrocarbon- and chemical compound-rich regions.