Good morning. Earnings, hearings, and launches, oh my! It’s a busy week, folks. Let’s dive right in.

In today's edition...
🐸 WeSpace’s lunar hopper
🌴 TROPICS takes off
🗓️ The week ahead

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Israel’s WeSpace Plans a Lunar Hopper

Israeli startup WeSpace Technologies is angling to provide Israel’s official contribution to the Artemis program with its lunar hopper.

The company plans to launch its first craft in less than three years to begin providing “flying services on the Moon,” CEO Yifat Feffer told Payload.

Lunar hopping: WeSpace’s offering to the growing lunar economy is a small spacecraft, called a “hopper,” which can fly customer payloads over the lunar surface for simpler and more effective data collection.

Feffer said only 5% of the Moon’s surface is mapped to a level of detail that is actually practical for surface mining and infrastructure operations. “You don't have practical information that you can [use to] go and bring the magnesium, you don't know where the water ice exactly is, you don't know the concentration,” she said.

The hopper is poised to change that. The autonomously-flown craft uses rocket propellant to hover over the surface of the Moon in the relative no man’s land between the surface and orbital altitude. The lander is designed to fly over obstacles and navigate craters and rifts where constant radio communication is impossible (and, coincidentally, where water ice can most likely be found).

Hop into the market: Israel is probing its domestic space industry for a contribution to the Artemis program, and WeSpace says it’s positioning itself for selection. The company has had conversations with Artemis project managers at NASA Ames, and believes its technology fits squarely into the mobility requirement under the agency’s Moon-to-Mars objectives.

WeSpace isn’t stopping with government procurement, though—it also sees a commercial market for its services. Once there is infrastructure in place for lunar mining, Feffer said she anticipates terrestrial mining companies will get in on the lunar economy, and she hopes WeSpace’s hoppers will provide the surface intelligence those companies will need.

Back to the beginning: Feffer founded the company in 2019 along with CTO Yigal Harel, former project manager for the Beresheet lunar lander at SpaceIL.

• Beresheet, which means “in the beginning” in Hebrew, crash-landed on the lunar surface in May 2019.

• Had the landing been successful, it would have made Israel the fourth country to land a craft on the Moon and represented the first commercial lunar landing (a milestone yet to be reached).

While ultimately unsuccessful, the energy and enthusiasm for the Beresheet inspired Feffer and Harel to pursue the idea for a lunar hopper. “If we can redo this methodology of working—going back to the Moon, finding a specific need, and struggling with it wisely—we can support and assist the market of deep space to be open, as it should be,” Feffer said.

Sponsored 

The OS for spacecraft and complex operations

Are your spacecraft testing and ops procedures stuck on documents, spreadsheets, and wikis?

Are you still using paper checklists or Confluence pages for your procedures?

Time to join the revolution with Epsilon3.

Epsilon3 modernizes space missions and complex engineering and testing by building the industry standard of operational software.

They produce a web-based platform for managing complex spacecraft/aerospace operational and testing procedures that provides coordination, assurance, and risk reduction. The top-notch team came from Northrop, NASA, Google, and SpaceX, where they ran operations to bring American astronauts to the ISS.

Innovate reliably, securely, at speed and scale. Let Epsilon3's platform worry about managing complex operational procedures, saving you time and reducing errors.

Request a demo on Epsilon3's website to learn more. (Or if you’re a software engineer, apply to join their team.)

Rocket Lab Launches NASA’s Storm Chaser Birds

Two NASA storm-tracking satellites lifted off aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle yesterday in New Zealand, putting the first half of the planned four-satellite constellation into orbit.

The “Rocket Like A Hurricane” mission was the first of two launches that will build the Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats, or TROPICS, mission.

Storm chasers: TROPICS is a cubesat LEO constellation that will analyze storm intensity, temperature, and humidity to better inform prediction models for tropical cyclones and hurricanes.

• Each cubesat weighs ~5 kg

• NASA will deploy the four satellites into two distinct LEO planes

Rocket Lab tagging in: NASA initially chose Astra to launch the sats. However, after the loss of two TROPICS cubesats in a failed Astra launch last year, NASA decided to move the payload to Rocket Lab.

This was the fourth Rocket Lab launch in 2023. The launch provider is planning to launch 15 times in 2023, including a second TROPICS mission planned for two weeks from now. Rocket Lab’s Electron has proven to be one of the most consistent rocket platforms on the small-lift market. The company will provide a mission update on its Q1 financial results management call tomorrow after the bell.

Register For Our Next Webinar

Launch costs have fallen dramatically over the past several years, but much of the focus of current offerings is on reaching LEO. Launches beyond this, like to GEO and Cislunar, are also ripe for cost disruption as demand is set to grow. The use of orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs) in in-space transportation and services is a key factor in achieving this vision.

This webinar will dive into the launch market beyond LEO and how infrastructure like OTVs can push costs down.

In Other News

• China’s Tianzhou-5 cargo craft separated from the Tiangong space station and switched to independent flight.

• SpaceX’s Starlink surpassed 1.5M subscribers.

• Mark Kelly and Roy Bridges were inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame.

• Dragonfly could be forced to delay its 2024 mission to Saturn’s moon Titan because of budget cuts.

• Momentus raised the Vigoride-5 space tug orbit for the first time using its water propellant thruster.

• China’s reusable spaceplane landed after 276 days in orbit.

The View from LA

Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin got an honorary promotion to Air Force brigadier general on Friday at Los Angeles Air Force Base. He also became an honorary member of the Space Force.