Good morning and happy Friday. We’d like to extend a special welcome to the 210 of you who hopped aboard this week.

In today's edition...
🔥 Momentus in trouble
🧀 Wisconsinites ❤️ space
💫 Payload's picks

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Momentus Cash Dwindles

Momentus ($MNTS) notched a number of key milestones this quarter, but continues to stare down a dangerously depleting cash reserve, the company revealed yesterday in its Q1 financial results.

By the numbers:

• Cash as of Mar. 31 = $38.6M

• Net income = -$20.8M

• Backlog as of Apr. 30 = $33M

• Momentus generated minimal revenue this quarter

Proving out space tug: The company has two functioning spacecraft in orbit. “We are now operating Vigoride-5 and Vigoride-6 concurrently, and both missions mark key milestones in demonstrating the value proposition of our technology,” said Momentus chief John Rood.

• Momentus also hit a major milestone earlier this week by raising the Vigoride-5 spacecraft orbit using its water propellant thruster.

Cash Burn

Momentus is inching towards bankruptcy. The company has been burning cash to the tune of $8M per month over the last year. Extrapolating the cash burn, the company has roughly five months of runway.

Payload’s take: With a current market cap of ~$40M, equivalent to the total cash on hand, raising additional funds will be a challenge. The company also faces a Nasdaq de-listing, which would further limit access to capital pools if executed.

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Lakes, Limberger, and…Launch?

You might think more dairy than deep space when you think about Wisconsin, but the Badger State is the most space-obsessed in the nation, according to a study released Thursday.

Science news publication Alt Futures tracked nationwide space-related Google searches, including “NASA DART,” “International Space Station,” and “Mars rover,” between April 1, 2022 and March 31, 2023.

Overall, Google searches for space-related keywords were up 10% over the past year, according to a spokesperson from Alt Futures.

Win: Wisconsin’s 5.9M residents used Google to search for space terms more than 122,000 times per month over the past year. When standardized, that equals 6,920 space-related searches per 100,000 people. The top search term? “Artemis launch.”

Place: DC is the runner up, with 5,612 space searches per 100,000 people. Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whose life inspired the book and movie Hidden Figures, was the top search term.

Show: Wyoming rounds out the top three most space-obsessed states in a photo finish, with 5,611 space searches per 100,000 people, just one less than DC. Starbase may be more than 1,500 miles away in Texas, but that doesn’t stop Wyomingites from being interested, with “spacex starship” being the top search term.

And the rest: Vermont, Alaska, Florida, North Dakota, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and South Dakota rounded out the top 10, in that order.

Some other well-known space states were stuck in the basement of the rankings.

• California, home to Vandenberg Space Force Base in addition to well-known space companies like SpaceX, ranked 30th.

• Alabama ranked 31st, despite its historical and current-day ties to the space program in Huntsville.

• Texas, which hosts launch facilities for both SpaceX and Blue Origin in addition to NASA’s astronaut training pipeline, came in 35th.

• The least interested state was Missouri, with just 1,126 searches per 100,000.

In Other News

• China’s secretive spaceplane may have executed multiple object release and recapture maneuvers during its 276 days in orbit.

• NASA hit a record 200 gigabit per second on an Earth-to-satellite optical link.

• The Space Force’s commercial services office is opening a new location outside DC.

• Intuitive Machines ($LUNR) announced its lunar lander mission has been pushed back to Q3.

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- Creating KPIs for marketing and BD
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-The importance of marketing and BD working together

The View from Space

New images snapped by NASA’s Perseverance rover reveal a dried-up riverbed that appears to have supported a deeper and faster flowing river than initially thought.