At the 35th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, BlackSky announced that the company has successfully achieved several significant on-orbit milestones of their first two Earth-imaging spacecraft, Global-1 and -2.

Demonstrating the full operational performance of the spacecraft, the company showcased several images of economic points of interest taken by the first two smallsats in its high-revisit, Earth-imaging constellation.

This is pass one of a pre-production time-series image stack that is not fully representative of a BlackSky imagery product. Image is copyright BlackSky Global LLC. All rights reserved.

The satellites, which were developed, designed, and manufactured by BlackSky, provide 1 meter resolution color imagery with frequent revisit rates of 95 percent of the Earth’s population. The constellation’s goal is to provide a fast revisit rate critical for monitoring global events or locations, as well as low latency.

The smallsats are used in conjunction with the BlackSky platform and ground architecture; together they serve as the nucleus of the company’s commercial offering which will help organizations detect changes and threats around the world.

Artistic rendition of the Global-1 smallsat. Image is courtesy of BlackSky.

Global-1 was launched November 28, 2018, from the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Satish Dhawan Space Center aboard a PSLV launch vehicle. Global-2 was launched the following week on December 3, 2018, on Spaceflight’s SSO-A mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The company is on track to launch Global-3 and Global-4 in the coming months and plans to launch up to six more satellites later this year.

Nick Merski, VP of space operations at BlackSky, said the company has completed the mission performance validation scenarios, successfully calibrated the systems and conducted extensive testing of the smallsats and end-to-end mission operations,. The images from Global-1 and Global-2, the firm’s first-generation spacecraft, validate the company’s ability to task, capture, and process high-quality images. With eight satellites on-orbit by the end of this year, BlackSky expects to deliver more than five revisits a day over many sites of interest; by 2020, with more than 16 smallsats on orbit, that will double and provide hourly monitoring. That’s a profound transformation for the market.

Brian O’Toole, CEO of BlackSky, added that in addition to these on-orbit milestones, the company has fully integrated the constellation with the firm’s global intelligence platform, which now puts us on track to deliver unique imaging and analytic solutions to customers. BlackSky is delivering on the promise of how the economics of high-performance smallsat constellations will enable a new era of global intelligence. With these milestones complete, the company is looking forward to commercial availability later this spring.

Rocket Lab has announced the next evolution of their mission services — the in-house designed and built Photon™ satellite platform.

The company now delivers an integrated spacecraft build and launch service. The end-to-end mission solution enables smallsat customers to focus on delivering their service from orbit and generating revenue, rather than building their own satellite hardware.

With an available payload mass of up to 170 kg*, Photon is designed for a range of LEO missions, including technology demonstrations, risk reduction pathfinders, constellations and hosted payloads. Developed as a configurable platform, Photon is ideal for existing and emerging applications such as communications, remote sensing, and Internet of Things (IoT). 

Photon is a highly-advanced evolution of the Electron launch vehicle’s Kick Stage, which has been successfully deployed on four orbital Electron missions. Operating a high-powered iteration of the flight-proven 3D printed Curie® propulsion system, Photon can support missions with an orbital life span of up to five years. Photon also includes an S-band communication system, a high-performance attitude control system, and a robust avionics suite.

To meet the growing demand for tailored small spacecraft with dependable fast delivery, Rocket Lab has drawn on its proven heritage of rapidly scaling production with Electron launch vehicle program. Manufactured at Rocket Lab’s Huntington Beach, California headquarters, a Photon spacecraft can be launched on Electron in as little as four months from order to orbit.

To the right side in this photo is Rocket Lab’s Photon smallsat bus.

Photo is courtesy of the company.

The first operational Photon will be launched from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in Q4 2019, with customer missions in active planning for 2020.

Rocket Lab Founder and Chief Executive Officer Peter Beck said Photon was designed to be an integrated part of the Rocket Lab mission experience from the very inception of the Electron launch vehicle program. He noted that small satellite operators want to focus on providing data or services from space, but building satellite hardware is a significant barrier to achieving this. The time, resources and expertise required to build hardware can draw small satellite operators away from their core purpose, delaying their path to orbit and revenue. As the turn-key solution for complete small satellite missions, Rocket Lab brings space within easy reach, enabling customers to focus on their payload and mission — the company looks after the rest.

*Orbit and configuration dependent.

The leadership team for Amazon’s newly revealed broadband satellite constellation, code-named Project Kuiper, includes engineers who left SpaceX’s Starlink constellation program last year as part of a reorganization, industry sources say.

The personnel shift, first reported today by CNBC, illustrates how interconnected and competitive the satellite mega-constellation business is turning out to be.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the sources said the engineers include Rajeev Badyal, who was the SpaceX vice president in charge of the Starlink program before the reorganization; and Mark Krebs, a veteran of Google’s aerospace efforts who played a key role in developing the first two prototype Starlink satellites for SpaceX.

SpaceX’s two prototype Starlink satellites are seen on either side of their carrier in advance of their launch last year. Industry sources say some of the engineers who were involved in developing those prototypes will be playing leadership roles in Amazon’s Project Kuiper. (SpaceX via YouTube)

Both of those engineers were identified as casualties of last year’s Starlink reorganization, which was said to involve a trip by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to the company’s satellite development facility in Redmond, Wash., to fire at least seven senior managers.

GeekWire’s efforts to obtain comment from Badyal and Krebs were unsuccessful, and their LinkedIn profiles don’t yet reflect new positions. Amazon declined to discuss their status.

“As a matter of company policy we don’t comment on personnel,” an Amazon spokesperson told GeekWire in an email. “We’ve brought together an incredibly smart group of experts from across this industry to lead Project Kuiper.”

Bringing on a team with Starlink experience could help Amazon make rapid headway in its drive to put 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit to beam space-based broadband data services to billions of people who are currently underserved. The company lists more than 70 Project Kuiper jobs on its website, with virtually all of them offered in Bellevue, Washington — not far from SpaceX’s digs in Redmond.

Amazon will face a steep challenge when it comes to catching up with SpaceX, which is pursuing the same goal of affordable, fast-response global connectivity.

The aim of SpaceX’s management overhaul was to accelerate the design and testing of next-generation Starlink satellites. The first prototypes, nicknamed Tintin A and B, were launched in February 2018. Last May, Musk wrote in a tweet that the broadband connection provided by the prototypes was “good enough to play fast-response video games.” But since then, the satellites’ design and planned configuration have gone through significant changes.

In filings with the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX said it was reworking the orbital arrangement of the satellites, and redesigning them for safe disposal at the end of their operating life. SpaceX has given notice that it aims to start launching next-generation satellites for the Starlink constellation next month.

Rajeev Badyal

Eventually, SpaceX plans to have nearly 12,000 satellites in orbit, and the company has applied to license up to a million satellite user terminals.

Late last month, SpaceX filed another series of applications to operate six satellite gateways, plus a telemetry, tracking and command station in Brewster, Wash. The six gateways would be in Redmond and North Bend, Wash.; Hawthorne, Calif.; Conrad, Mont.; Merrillan, Wis.; and Greenville, Pa. Amazon could conceivably counter with its own AWS Ground Station network, planned as a partnership with Lockheed Martin.

Amazon hasn’t yet filed applications for the satellites with the FCC. However, it has been in talks with the agency, which passed along information about Project Kuiper to the International Telecommunication Union last month.

SpaceX is by no means Amazon’s only rival in the mega-constellation market: The international OneWeb consortium and Telesat, Canada’s biggest satellite operator, have also made significant headway in campaigns to put hundreds of broadband data satellites in low Earth orbit, or LEO.

OneWeb had its first six broadband satellites launched from French Guiana in February, and the company says it’s on track to have scores of spacecraft in orbit within a year. Telesat launched its first satellite for a LEO constellation last year, and plans to put hundreds more in space by the mid-2020s.

LeoSat Enterprises has plans for a LEO broadband satellite constellation that makes use of laser communications, and a Facebook subsidiary called PointView Tech is said to be working on a similar laser-based project. Even Boeing has a mega-constellation plan on the books.

The SpaceX-to-Amazon switchover illustrates how the satellite broadband rush sometimes makes for strange bedfellows: Way back in 2014, a former Google executive named Greg Wyler reportedly discussed the idea of a LEO internet constellation with Musk. SpaceX ended up going forward with Starlink on its own, fueled in part by a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity. Wyler, meanwhile, pursued the idea separately as OneWeb’s founder and executive chairman, with total investment now at $3.4 billion.

In 2017, OneWeb struck a launch deal with Blue Origin — which was founded and continues to be financed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin also has a deal to launch satellites for Telesat. Telesat, in turn, has forged a separate partnership with Alphabet’s Loon, a corporate cousin of SpaceX backer Google.

By Alan Boyle, GeekWire

Made In Space, Inc. (MIS) is developing an in-space manufacturing system to enable precision long-baseline interferometry missions.

This technology, known as Optimast-SCI (Structurally Connected Interferometer), equips an ESPA-class smallsat with the company’s extended structure manufacturing technology. It enables the deployment of a 20-meter optical boom interferometer with modular internal optics bench developed with Lowell Observatory, a world leader in astronomical optical interferometry.

Optimast. Image is courtesy of Made In Space.

Optimast-SCI is a mission application developed from the company’s Archinaut program and leverages manufacturing capabilities that have been validated on orbit and in a thermal vacuum environment. Optimast SCI’s manufacturing system — which recently reached a critical testing milestone qualifying it for a spaceflight — is a self-contained, scalable machine capable of producing microgravity-optimized structures on-orbit.

Interferometry is the method of collecting and merging data from two separate collectors of electromagnetic waves ( e.g. , light or radio waves) from a single object and analyzing the patterns those merged waves create. This allows astronomers to combine signals from multiple telescopes, effectively forming one giant telescope.

Ground-based astronomical interferometers are extremely large research facilities (up to 430 meters in length) and are often limited by atmospheric conditions. Optimast-SCI’s in-space configuration can resolve faint objects at less than 5 milliarcsecond resolving power and enable new high resolution, space-based missions in astrophysics, planetary science, Earth remote sensing, and space situational awareness, all with no atmospheric distortion.

Eliminating the turbulent distorting effects of the atmosphere by operating from space will allow the observatory to examine objects of interest for as much as 10,000 times longer than a terrestrial observatory. Optimast-SCI provides an affordable approach to space-based optical interferometry that fits within existing mission classes and small satellite mission budgets.

Made In Space is a developer of manufacturing technologies in space and the company looks to pioneer a new generation of functional structures in space, thereby enabling a variety of new mission applications through the firm’s Archinaut technology, a 2015 NASA Tipping Point award winner.

Michael Snyder, Made In Space Chief Engineer, noted that the rapid evolution of the company’s in-space manufacturing technology has introduced new, cost-effective capabilities to the market that can advance space exploration. The application of this technology allows humanity to access new astronomical observation capabilities to explore the universe and that is very exciting.”

GomSpace Group AB (”GomSpace” or the “Company”) and Sky and Space Global have recently conducted evaluation discussions regarding the provisioning and manufacturing by GomSpace of an additional constellation of smallsats for global services for Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M).

The parties have also discussed changes to the original agreement and have now consented on the principle terms for the provision and manufacturing by GomSpace of an additional constellation of smallsats under a new agreement and the principle terms for replacement of the original agreement entered into in 2017 (as amended). A replacement of the original agreement is necessary for the continued cooperation under the original project.

In 2017, GomSpace entered into a procurement agreement with Sky and Space Global regarding the development and qualification of a nanosatellite platform and the subsequent production and delivery of smallsats from GomSpace A/S to Sky and Space Global. In the same year, the parties entered into an addendum according to which the original order was increased to encompass additional development of the capabilities of the nanosatellites. Further, Sky and Space Global has an option (but no obligation) to order CSL Modem Implementation.

The total contract value of the procurement agreement is approximately 64.5 million euros, excluding the option to add CSL Moden Implementation, which is worth an additional 1.4 million euros. As of this writing, a total of approximately 7.2 million euros has been paid under the original agreement (for the development of the platform until critical design review, progress on advance communication payload and purchase of long lead items).

Principle terms for new agreement

• Provision and manufacturing by GomSpace of a new constellation of nanosatellites.
• Delivery in two batches (second batch optional for Sky and Space Global).
• First deliveries planned for 2019 and last deliveries in 2020.
• Total order value will range between approximately EUR 4 million to EUR 7 million (depending on number of satellities and final price).
• The technical specifications, statement of work, delivery schedule, and the commercial, payment and legal terms to be finally decided in a definite agreement expected to be entered no later than May 2019.
• Advance payments (EUR 550,000) and financial assurance for payments to be made by Sky and Space Global for GomSpace throughout the project.
• Conditional upon secured financing by Sky and Space Global and the parties reaching an agreement on changes to the original agreement entered into in 2017 (as amended).

Principle terms for changes to the original agreement entered into in 2017 (as amended)

• Provision and manufacturing by GomSpace of nanosatellites
• Delivery in batches similar to original agreement, that would be aligned to the project under the new agreement (see above)
• Total order value is depending on several options including development, services and choice of satellites and will therefore range between approximately EUR 48 million and EUR 70 million.
• The technical specifications, statement of work, delivery schedule, and the commercial, payment and legal terms to be finally decided in a definite agreement expected to be entered no later than May 2019.
• Advance payments to be made and security for payments to be provided by Sky and Space Global.
• Conditional upon the parties entering into the new agreement (see above).
• A replacement of the original agreement is necessary for the continued cooperation under the original project.

The news that Amazon has decided to forge forward and build a global, low-latency, high-speed broadband network of 3,236 smallsats in LEO is taking the general and industry press by storm.

Artistic rendition of the Kuiper Belt.

This giant retailer is calling this constellation “Project Kuiper.” Kuiper is that area of space beyond the eight planets of our solar system, a distant region of icy objects that orbit beyond Neptune. This area of space contains millions of small, icy bodies that are believed to be the residual material from the formation of the outer planets.

The Kuiper smallsats are projected to occupy a low orbit between 590 km. and 630 km. Such an orbit will enable the small spacecraft to provide better communications latency; however, this altitude will result in a shorter lifespan and more limited coverage per satellite as a result.

An in-depth article regarding this consideration by Amazon is available at the broadband.guru infosite, located at broadband.guru/2019/04/05/now-amazon-plans-3236-strong-satellite-broadband-constellation/,

HawkEye 360 Inc. it has launched RFGeo, a first of its kind radio frequency (RF) signal mapping product.

RFGeo uses the unique data generated by the HawkEye Constellation of space-based RF sensing satellites to identify and geolocate RF signals, providing a new global geospatial data layer. RFGeo is the company’s first commercially available product.

Although RF signals are ubiquitous, there has never before been a commercially available product that can independently locate, process, and track a broad range of signals. RFGeo will initially support identification and geolocation of maritime VHF radio channels, marine emergency distress beacons, and vessel Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals. In the coming months, HawkEye 360 will expand the signal catalog to support more applications. Mapping RF signals will provide valuable insights for many markets, such as defense, border security, maritime, emergency response, and telecommunications.

RFGeo is part of HawkEye 360’s core product line for delivering global spectrum awareness. The product simplifies the complexity of understanding RF signals by providing the coordinates and observed characteristics of the identified emitters. RFGeo delivers the RF analytics in a standardized format for loading into common commercial GIS software tools for further analysis.

HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini stated that with the launch of RFGeo, HawkEye 360 is now fulfilling customer orders. Through RFGeo, customers will access the powerful RF analytics generated by the company’s satellite constellation so they can gain a more comprehensive view of the world. HawkEye 360 is bringing truly compelling RF analytics to the market, further cementing the firm’s position as an exciting and fast-growing leader in the new space field.

HawkEye 360 Director of Product,Brian Chapman, added the company is enabling customers to link RF signal geolocations from this RFGeo product to events occurring around the world. RFGeo will help customers monitor RF signals to support a wide range of high-value applications and missions, such as maritime domain awareness.

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) will be exhibiting their latest innovations in hosted payload satellite technologies at the 35th Space Symposium, April 8-11, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

During the exhibition, GA-EMS will provide updates regarding recent contract awards and advancements in optimized hosted payload spacecraft to deliver multiple customer payloads meeting their requirement in LEO and beyond.

GA-EMS is working with NASA to host the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) payload on an optimized OTB satellite and is under contract to the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center Hosted Payload Solutions (HoPS) program for the Argos Advanced Data Collection System (A-DCS).  GA-EMS is also part of the Draper team supporting NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which will return NASA to the moon.

GA-EMS will be exhibiting in Booth #330, located in the Exhibit Center at the Broadmoor Hotel, site of the 35th Space Symposium.

Scott Forney, the President of GA-EMS, said that since last year’s Space Symposium, the company has received contracts that will leverage the firm’s scalable architectures, volume-efficient packaging, manufacturing expertise, and on-orbit experience to launch customer missions into space. Two of these contracts anticipate launch dates as early as 2021 and 2022, demonstrating the flexibility of the GA-EMS Orbital Test Bed (OTB) platform approach to rapidly and cost-efficiently accommodate specific customer payload and mission requirements.

Nick Bucci, VP of Missile Defense and Space Systems at GA-EMS, noted that this is an exciting time for the company, as the firm anticipates the imminent launch of the first OTB spacecraft on the next Falcon Heavy, which will deliver multiple payloads, including the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Deep Space Atomic Clock, to LEO. The company has generated a great deal of momentum this past year and firmly believe that the firm’s customer-centric approach to providing flexible, scalable and optimized bus designs along with launch coordination and on-orbit mission control services, is critical to delivering payloads when and where customers need them as efficiently as possible.

Blink Astro® (Blink®) has successfully launched their custom radio payload, hosted on the NanoAvionics’ M6P 6U spacecraft using the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) PSLV-C45launch vehicle.

The launch occurred at 11:57pm EDT on March 31, 2019, from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. Preliminary communications have been established with the M6P host spacecraft.

The primary objective of the mission will be to demonstrate the reliability and quality of Blink’s end-to-end device connectivity solution. There will be satellite provisioning conducted by NanoAvionics for the first several weeks of this mission. Upon completion of this provisioning, Blink® will conduct ground to space testing which will last several months thereafter.
 
Specific tests to be conducted during the technology demonstration mission will include reception and coverage of Blink’s low cost IoT ground terminals, large point-to-point network architecture antenna performance, and overall signal quality.

Dr. John R. Olds, CEO of Blink® and Blink’s parent organization, SpaceWorks Enterprises, Inc., said that the company’s technical teams at SpaceWorks Orbital and Blink Astro are looking forward to getting to work on testing the firm’s proprietary receiver hardware. The company is bullish on the space-based IoT market and  believe the low cost, highly efficient receiver technology and small spacecraft platforms will have a strong role to play in accelerating the growth of this global market.
 

C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. (TSXV: CMI) has announced their first successful integration with LEO satellite tracking capabilities — the test was completed with the C-COM iNetVu® FLY-981 Ku-band antenna and with Kepler Communications’ first in orbit LEO satellites, KIPP and CASE.

Kepler is a pioneering smallsat telecommunications company based in Toronto, Canada.  During the store and forward tests, C-COM’s FLY-981 antenna successfully acquired signal to Kepler’s nanosats and achieved data transfer speeds of more than 100 Mbps downlink and 30M bps uplink.Shortly thereafter, the same data was downloaded to Kepler’s teleport in Inuvik, Canada.

This uniquely successful test completes a significant development project between the two companies. C-COM’s engineering team developed the necessary tracking algorithms to work with the iNetVu® 7000 series controllers and Kepler provided access to their LEO satellite constellation and assisted with daily testing.

The iNetVu® FLY-981 (photo to right) is C-COM’s 98 cm., fully automatic and motorized Ku-band flyaway product. This antenna system is a highly portable terminal of choice for various industries such as Oil & Gas, Exploration, Emergency Response, Military Communications, Cellular Backhaul, Satellite News Gathering, and many other vertical markets.

C-COM offers classic and next generation Driveaway, Flyaway, Fixed Motorized, and Manpack systems (iNetVu®) for any vertical market where communications are challenged due to disruption or deficiency. C-COM has more than 20 different Comm-on-the-Pause (COTP) antenna models, integrated with all major modem manufacturers, approved with most major satellite operators, and is working closely with more than 500 active dealers in over 100 countries. More than 8,000 iNetVu® systems have been sold since the brand’s inception.

Working with a renowned research team at the University of Waterloo, the Company is also developing an electronically steerable, Comms-on-the-Move (COTM) Ka-band flat panel antenna system based on phased array technology with the potential to revolutionize satellite’s addressable mobile markets for land, airborne and maritime.

Leslie Klein, President and CEO of C-COM Satellite Systems Inc., said that for C-COM, this test with Kepler Communications LEO nano-satellites opens up new developing markets for the company’s extensive worldwide reseller base. The store and forward data delivery services offered by Kepler’s LEO constellation using C-COM’s iNetVu® mobile antenna system’s Low Earth Orbit option will provide customers with a unique, cost-effective large data transfer capability.

Mina Mitry, CEO of Kepler Communications, added that, for Kepler, the addition of the C-COM FLY-981 as an approved satellite antenna solution expands the potential user base beyond maritime applications, to land-based mobile/transportable applications such as natural resource exploration and extraction, remote research bases, disaster management,  defense, and many other vertical markets requiring high-capacity connectivity where portability and reliability are key considerations.