SOS (4/10/23)

Good morning. We hope you had a great weekend celebrating whatever holiday you celebrate with family and friends.

Today’s newsletter: 📻 Everywhere emerges from stealth🛩️ ISRO joins the spaceplane game🗓️ The week ahead

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Communicating from everywhere

Everywhere Communications, a seven-year-old company providing satellite-enabled emergency comms for teams operating in extreme environments, has emerged from a lengthy period of stealth with new integrations in its emergency notification and messaging platform.

Everywhere, all at once: The Annapolis, MD-based software company aims to provide a “single pane of glass” for companies to communicate with teams operating out in the field, wherever that may be, CEO Patrick Shay told Payload. That means that rather than having to coordinate several forms of communication or liaise between people in need and emergency services, Everywhere puts all those capabilities on a single platform.

Everywhere is “a platform company, so we support multiple networks and multiple devices—really the best tools for the job,” Shay said. Central to those tools are:

• Iridium’s satellite network for global comms coverage

• Garmin’s satellite-enabled inReach devices to enable GPS and messaging between colleagues and emergency services

The company serves 300 customers in 150 countries, and its platform has been used in more than 10,000 SOS events to date.

Keeping connected: With the updated platform, customers are able to use WhatsApp on their phones to monitor and respond to emergency notifications. Everywhere also integrated Esri, an advanced mapping service used widely by Everywhere’s government and enterprise customers, to increase the accuracy of its situational awareness.

What’s next? Right now, Everywhere employs a team of ~35 and is hoping to grow that number by ~30-40% over the next year and a half.

Everywhere has been doubling its customer base and revenue each year, and Shay said he expects that trend to continue as it adds new verticals and geographic regions to its customer base.

ISRO continues building its own spaceplane

An uncrewed spaceplane prototype developed by ISRO successfully landed on a runway at Chitradurga, India, on April 2.

The winged vehicle, officially called the Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator (RLV-TD), was heli-dropped from 4.5 km to simulate an approach from space. The RLV-TD plane then maneuvered itself to the runway and deployed a parachute to kill much of its velocity of 350 km per hour.

How we got here: ISRO built the RLV-TD as a flying testbed for evaluating technologies needed to ultimately build an Indian reusable launch vehicle. In 2016, ISRO launched a heat-shield-enabled RLV-TD to an altitude of 65 km at hypersonic speeds, which successfully steered itself 450 km to a targeted splashdown at sea. This month’s precise landing test of an RLV-TD complements the 2016 flight.

Let's go orbital: In a post-landing address, ISRO chief S. Somanath said the agency will conduct more landing experiments (LEX) under varied conditions to continue refining a RLV design. The ultimate such test will see a 60% larger RLV-TD autonomously land after being launched to orbit on a modified GSLV rocket.

The orbital RLV-TD could spend up to a month in space, autonomously operating payloads and experiments onboard, and then deorbit itself and land on a runway. ISRO intends to test air-breathing propulsion on a future RLV-TD flight to assess its viability as part of RLV’s ongoing design ideation.

What India's spaceplane isn't: Media outlets have frequently compared the RLV to NASA’s retired Space Shuttle. But ISRO is neither designing the RLV to carry humans to space nor is it intended to be a heavy-lift launch vehicle. As an autonomous platform, the RLV will be much more akin to the Boeing X-37B and Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser.

What's the catch? The RLV is an exciting project that could boost India’s rocket fleet but it’s also missing a public target launch year. The RLV is also a low priority while ISRO’s major growth focus remains its Gaganyaan program to indigenously send humans to space by mid-decade.

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In Other News

• ULA had an issue with the Centaur upper stage of its new Vulcan rocket during testing on March 29. In a photo published by Ars, a large explosion is visible by the test stand.

• Starship is ready for launch pending regulatory approval, per Elon.

• Quantum unveiled Ranger, its new orbital transfer vehicle.

• SpaceX launched the Intelsat-40e satellite carrying NASA’s TEMPO instrument to GEO.

The View from Space

The James Webb Space Telescope snaps another masterpiece, this time of Cassiopeia A.