Tidy up (9/7/23)

Good morning. Catch the Payload team in action next week at the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Aerospace Summit in DC. Both Jacqueline and Rachael will be moderating panels on the second, space-focused day of the event. Please say hello if you’ll be there!

Today’s newsletter:
🛰️ Turion nabs six contracts
💲 Antaris’ preferred seed round
📝 The contract report

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Exclusive: Turion Space Wins Six NASA and USAF Contracts

Turion is announcing a slew of wins in its efforts to design, build, and deploy its on-orbit mobility and debris removal infrastructure. The Irvine, CA-based space sustainability startup has notched six recent contracts from NASA, the Space Force, and the Air Force, each supporting a different area of its product stack.

“We're trying to grow the economic carrying capacity of Earth orbit, or grow the economic output of Earth orbit,” CEO and cofounder Ryan Westerdahl told Payload. “The way we're going to do that is with our tactically responsive Droids for real time domain awareness and on-demand mobility.”

It’s not the government’s first time supporting Turion, which won at least $1M in Orbital Prime contracts last year, but the new contracts, worth a combined $5M+, demonstrate the government’s continued buy-in to the mission of cleaning up in orbit.

Turion 101: Turion was founded in 2020 to tackle the trash problem and congestion in LEO. The company graduated from Y Combinator’s S21 batch, and since then, has been working to design and build its mobility and debris removal craft, called Droids.

Droid-1, the first demo mission, launched in June aboard a Transporter flight on a mission to collect in-situ space situational awareness data to prep for future flights. That craft is currently undergoing commissioning—slower than expected, Westerdahl said, but still on the right track—and is expected to begin sending data home by the end of the year. Turion has signed an agreement with Exolaunch to launch Droid-2, the first docking mission, in October 2024.

Raking in the contracts: In the last 12 months, Westerdahl said the company has pulled in $6.8M in contracts from NASA, USAF, and USSF.

The recent contracts:

1. A $1.7M Direct-to-Phase-II contract from AFWERX to develop a simulation tool to optimize the cost of on-orbit servicing missions

2. A $1.5M STTR Phase II contract from AFWERX to finish building the first prototype of Turion’s capture mechanism

3. A $1.25M SBIR Direct-to-Phase II contract from AFWERX to integrate the company’s satellite systems and ground infrastructure with SDA protocol

4. An $850,000 NASA Phase II Ignite contract for a debris removal micro-Droid

5. A $75,000 AFWERX contract in partnership with the University of Hawaii to develop a space debris imagery payload

6. A NASA Phase III contract for a project that will push the team a step closer to a complete on-orbit servicing demo mission

Each of these contracts is supporting the development of technologies that Turion will eventually commercialize as part of its awareness, servicing, and debris removal offerings, Westerdahl said.

“We always are only going after fixed price contracts that are going to help us advance our tech stack and pay for things that we're going to do anyways to execute our commercial plan,” he said. “The last thing we want to be is an SBIR shop.”

Enter the Mothership: Looking ahead, Turion is planning to build a larger central craft that can play host to many micro-Droids, deploying them on-demand as necessary for recon and removal.

“We think this is both the lowest-cost architecture and the lowest-risk architecture for doing debris removal with uncooperative objects that are large,” Westerdahl said.

Sponsored

Kepler supports out-of-this-world communications

Kepler is delivering on-orbit data at lightspeed with a constellation of optical satellites designed to act as Internet exchange points for space-to-space data relay.

The Internet-ready constellation will deliver data to and from spacecraft in real time, helping customers to get more from their data. The hybrid network will modernize on-orbit communications with a combination of SDA-standard optical technology, RF inter-satellite links, and a high-speed backhaul link to move space-generated data efficiently back to Earth.

Kepler’s services are solving the downlink bottleneck by providing real-time access to satellite data, optimized latency, and high-speed downlinking capabilities. Kepler offers customers a service-level agreement and turnkey solution to satisfy the complete communications requirements of a mission, including:

• Communications payloads for both optical and RF

• Spectrum licenses

• Security

• Ground infrastructure

• Edge computing

Kepler’s services will expand customer mission potential, solving the current and future gaps in global space communications.

Antaris Raises $3.5M In Seed Round

Antaris is hoping to bring enterprise tech concepts to space—and now it has more money to try to make that a reality.

Antaris, a SaaS platform for space, announced Wednesday that it raised $3.5M in additional seed funding. Streamlined Ventures, which specializes in early-stage investments, led the round, bringing Antaris’s total funding to $10M.

The details: The round also included funding from venture capital firms HCVC and E2MC, which participated in the company’s earlier seed and extension fundraising efforts. Under the deal, Ullas Naik, founder and general partner of Streamlined Ventures, will also join Antaris’ board of directors.

Antaris 101: The California-based startup offers a platform that can design satellites for a wide variety of applications from communications and imaging platforms to climate change and military intelligence, slashing the time it takes for companies to get to orbit.

The Antaris SaaS platform manages each satellite from conception to decommission, and its True Twin platform, which creates a digital twin of each satellite that can simulate software updates before its real-life counterpart gets them, can reduce costly malfunctions.

Antaris started in 2022 with the goal of creating a company that can build and operate satellites at scale. The company has inked deals with the likes of Phantom Space Corporation, Morpheus Space, Ananth Technologies Limited, and DoD SBIR.

Bringing SaaS to space: If the SaaS and digital twin applications sound familiar, that’s because they are. Scalable end-to-end technology has been at the forefront of the SaaS-heavy enterprise world, where digital twins and modular solutions have been the building blocks for every security, cloud, and data analytics platform we know and love today.

"Antaris is the first company we've seen that is committed to building a pure-play software and SaaS company to support satellites and space data networking,” Naik said in a statement. “This platform is game-changing for anyone looking to put a satellite into orbit or to operate satellite constellations."

Join Today’s Webinar!

Join Ari and the Italian Trade Agency for today’s webinar as they discuss the following:

• How Italy markets itself to space companies

• The challenges of marketing a country

• Why Italy

• And more…

In Other News

• Japan launched the SLIM lunar lander and the XRISM X-ray telescope atop a H-IIA rocket from Tanegashima.

• The Mars Society says it plans to open a technology institute.

• South Korea has shipped its lunar space environment monitoring instrument to the US for integration onto Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander.

• USSF announced its new mission statement: “secure our Nation’s interests in, from, and to space.”

• Terran Orbital ($LLAP) revealed seven new standardized satellite bus products.

The View from 2013

Happy 10th anniversary to one of our fave space pics: a very startled frog photobombing NASA’s LADEE launch from Wallops on Sept. 6, 2013.