Author: NASA Official

WASHINGTON — After a record-setting year of launch activity in 2022, SpaceX kicked off the new year Jan. 3 with a Falcon 9 launch of more than 110 smallsats.

The Falcon 9 lifted off on the Transporter-6 dedicated smallsat rideshare mission at 9:56 a.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. The rocket’s first stage, making its 15th flight, landed back at the Cape’s Landing Zone 1 eight and a half minutes after liftoff.

The rocket’s upper stage started releasing its 114 payloads into sun-synchronous orbit nearly an hour after liftoff, a process involving 82 individual deployments that took more than a half-hour to complete. SpaceX was able to confirm 77 of the deployments in real time.

The largest single customer on the launch, in terms of number of satellites, was Planet, which had 36 of its SuperDove imaging satellites on board. Planet has now launched more than 500 satellites, mostly cubesats like the SuperDoves.

Some of the other major payloads on Transporter-6 included:

• Six LEMUR cubesats for Spire, which operates a constellation for collecting weather and tracking data;
• Four imaging satellites for Satellogic, which has slowed the deployment of its constellation after revenues fell short of projections in 2022;
• Four radio-frequency intelligence satellites for Luxembourg-based Kleos and the BRO-8 radio-frequency intelligence satellite for French startup Unseenlabs;
• Three synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites for Iceye and two SAR satellites for Umbra;
• Two satellites for Lynk, which is developing a constellation to provide direct-to-handset connectivity services;
• Twelve SpaceBee internet-of-things satellites for SpaceX-owned Swarm Technologies;
• Gama Alpha, the first satellite by French company Gama to test solar sail technologies;
• The Electro-Optical/Infrared Weather Systems (EWS) technology demonstration cubesat for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command

Several of the payloads on Transporter-6 are orbital transfer vehicles that will later deploy satellites. They include two ION vehicles from D-Orbit, the second Vigoride tug from Momentus and Launcher’s first Orbiter vehicle.

Transporter-6 is the sixth in a series of smallsat rideshare missions by SpaceX, which performed the first two Transporter missions in 2021 and three in 2022. The company said in August that it continues to see strong demand for the services despite the rise in small launch vehicles that offer dedicated launch options for smallsats. All of SpaceX’s Transporter missions for 2023 are full, the company said then, although last-minute opportunities may arise.

A record 2022

Transporter-6 was the first orbital launch globally in 2023. It comes after a record 2022, when there were 186 orbital launch attempts, 40 more than 2021. A total of 179 launches were successful, compared to 136 in 2021.

Orbital launch activity has doubled in just the last five years. In 2017 there were 86 successful orbital launches in 90 attempts. SpaceX is responsible for much of that growth, having gone from 18 launches in 2017 to 61 in 2022, while Chinese launches increased from 18 in 2017 to 64 in 2022.

With the exception of New Zealand, which went from the first Rocket Lab Electron launch in 2017 to nine in 2022, other countries saw flat or reduced launch activity over the last five years. That includes Europe, which went from 11 launches in 2017 to 6 in 2022, and Japan, which had seven launches in 2017 but only a single, unsuccessful Epsilon launch in 2022.

SpaceX, whose 61 launches in 2022 were nearly double the 31 launches it conducted in 2021, will attempt to set another launch record in 2023. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has suggested the company will attempt as many as 100 launches in 2023, a total that likely include its Starship vehicle, whose first orbital launch is expected some time this year.

WASHINGTON — As Satellogic prepares to launch its latest imaging satellites, the company has slashed revenue projections, resulting in layoffs and delays in construction of a new factory.

Four NewSat satellites, built by Satellogic, are among the 114 payloads to be launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-6 dedicated smallsat rideshare mission. That mission is scheduled to launch Jan. 3 at 9:56 a.m. Eastern on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Satellogic signed a contract with SpaceX in May 2022 to launch 68 satellites on an unspecified number of launches.

The four satellites will join 26 currently in operation by Satellogic that provide high-resolution imagery. The company, in a business update Dec. 15, said it expected to launch 18 to 21 satellites in 2023, giving it enough satellites to map the Earth every two weeks.

That business update, which included the company’s financial results from the first half of 2022, showed revenue lagging earlier projections. The company recorded $2.4 million in revenue in the first half of the year, primarily from two unnamed customers, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Satellogic said in its business update it was projecting revenues of $6-8 million for all of 2022, and an adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) loss of $55-60 million. By contrast, in an analyst day presentation in November 2021, part of going public through a SPAC merger, Satellogic projected revenue of $47 million for 2022 and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $2 million.

Emiliano Kargieman, chief executive of Satellogic, acknowledged he was “disappointed” with the revenue from the first half of the year, but remained optimistic about the company’s long-term trajectory, citing an increase in demand for its imagery seen in the second half of the year. “Our bookings and current pipeline support continued strong growth into 2023,” he said in a Dec. 15 earnings call.

The company, which in November 2021 projected revenues of $132 million in 2023, growing to $787 million in 2025, now projects $30-50 million in revenues in 2023, increasing to $140-200 million in 2025. Satellogic projects an adjusted EDBITA loss of $20-35 million in 2023, reaching breakeven in 2024 and growing to positive $35-90 million in 2025.

Kargieman said the company now has a better idea of the sales cycle for its imagery and other products. “After another year of talking to customers, we’re extremely confident in the numbers that we’re guiding for next year,” he said.

The diminished revenues have forced the company to cut costs. That included laying off 18% of its workforce in the third quarter, reducing its staff to about 380 people. Rick Dunn, Satellogic’s chief financial officer, said the number of employees would remain “more or less flat” in 2023.

The company has also scaled back the growth of its constellation. In that November 2021 presentation, Satellogic projected having 111 satellites in orbit in 2023. The company will instead end 2023 with no more than 47 satellites, although Kargieman said in the call that some of the 10 satellites it launched in October 2020 could be retired by the end of 2023 as they reach the end of their three-year design life.

With those reduced projections, Satellogic has delayed completion of a new high-throughput satellite manufacturing facility it planned to open in 2022 in the Netherlands. That factory, which Satellogic said in late 2021 would be fully operational by the start of 2023, was designed to produce 25 satellites a quarter.

Kargieman said the company’s existing factory in Uruguay can produce 24 satellites a year, sufficient for its near-term needs. “Going forward, we can continue to grow that capacity,” he said, increasing it potentially by a factor of two or three. The Dutch factory will go into service when the company is ready to scale up the constellation to the 300 satellites needed for daily remapping of the Earth. “The exact timing is yet to be defined.”

Satellogic is now offering to sell satellites, rather than just imagery, to customers. Dunn projected that at least 25% of the company’s revenues in 2023 would come from this new “space systems” business line, although weighted towards the second half of the year.

The rest of the company’s revenues will continue to come from imagery sales as well as its “constellation as a service” or dedicated satellite constellation business line, where governments and other organizations pay to gain priority access to Satellogic’s constellation over a designated area. One example Kargieman cited was an agreement with the government of Albania announced in September to provide imagery over its territory. The three-year deal is worth $6 million and includes naming two NewSat satellites launching on Transporter-6 Albania-1 and -2.

Satellogic announced Dec. 13 a letter of intent with the Mexican space agency AEM for a similar constellation-as-a-service agreement, but the company did not disclose when the contract would be finalized or its anticipated value. However, the Indian space agency ISRO announced Dec. 30 that it met with AEM officials, who asked ISRO for assistance in building and launching a remote sensing satellite.

Satellogic, which raised $168 million when its SPAC merger closed in January 2022, projected having $78-82 million of cash on hand at the end of 2022. That is enough, Kargieman said, to get the company to breakeven in 2024. “We don’t require additional financing,” he said. “We’re really in control of how much we spend and how much we invest into our future business, so we don’t expect to be raising additional financing.”

WASHINGTON — A cubesat launched on Artemis 1 missed its original chance to go into orbit around the moon but could still carry out its primary mission if engineers fix its thrusters in the coming weeks.

The NASA-funded LunaH-Map spacecraft, a six-unit cubesat, was one of 10 cubesat secondary payloads flown on the Artemis 1 mission on the inaugural launch of the Space Launch System Nov. 16. Those payloads were deployed from the SLS upper stage several hours after liftoff.

In the months leading up to the liftoff there were concerns that the batteries on LunaH-Map might have drained during its long wait for launch. The cubesat could not be charged after it was secured on the rocket in the fall of 2021.

However, the batteries were in good condition when the spacecraft transmitted its first telemetry shortly after deployment. “Our batteries were at 70% state of charge,” said Craig Hardgrove, principal investigator for LunaH-Map at Arizona State University, during a presentation about the mission at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union Dec. 15. “That was in line with our very optimistic predictions.”

While the spacecraft had sufficient power, it ran into problems with its propulsion system. “We had a very brief window to fire our propulsion system and hit a lunar gravity assist to get back to the moon,” he said. However, the thrusters failed to operate as expected to enable that maneuver to go into lunar orbit.

LunaH-Map is equipped with a BIT-3 ion thruster from Busek that uses solid iodine fuel. Hardgrove said Doppler ranging data suggests that a valve is partially stuck, allowing some iodine through but not enough to generate the required thrust.

Spacecraft engineers are trying to correct the problem with heaters in the propulsion system to free up the valve. “The sticking is something that we knew about,” he said, suggesting it came from the long wait for the launch.

If the problem can be fixed by mid-January, he said the spacecraft could take an alternative trajectory to the moon, arriving in January 2024. After that, there are options for sending LunaH-Map to rendezvous with or fly by a near Earth asteroid.

Other spacecraft systems are working well, he said. The spacecraft’s primary instrument, a neutron spectrometer designed to look for water ice deposits at the lunar south pole, collected data as it flew by the moon five days after launch. “It shows that this instrument is capable of performing the science investigation that we had planned to do,” Hardgrove said.

LunaH-Map is not the only cubesat launched on Artemis 1 that suffered technical problems. A Japanese cubesat called OMOTENASHI that was designed to perform a “semi-hard” landing on the moon failed to generate enough power from its solar arrays to communicate with Earth and was declared a loss.

Controllers have struggled to contact the CubeSat to Study Solar Particles (CuSP), which also appeared to encounter a battery problem, and Near Earth Asteroid Scout, a cubesat with a solar sail to fly by an asteroid. Lockheed Martin’s LunIR cubesat encountered an “unexpected issue with our radio signal,” the company said Dec. 8, but still considered the mission a useful technology demonstration.

Hardgrove, in his conference talk, remained optimistic about LunaH-Map. “We’re not dead. We’re doing great,” he said. “I think we’re hopefully going to ignite our propulsion system soon.”