Category: Science

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of sound waves to break down tumors—a technique called histotripsy—in humans for liver treatment.

Pioneered at the University of Michigan, histotripsy offers a promising alternative to cancer treatments such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, which often have significant side effects.

FDA officials awarded clearance to HistoSonics, a company co-founded in 2009 by engineers and doctors for the use of histotripsy to destroy targeted liver tissue.

A human trial underway since 2021 at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center and other locations has treated patients with primary and metastatic liver tumors via histotripsy, demonstrating the technology’s ability to meet the testing’s primary effectiveness and safety targets.

“Histotripsy is an exciting new technology that, although it is in early stages of clinical use, may provide a noninvasive treatment option for patients with liver cancer. Hopefully it can be combined with systemic therapies for a synergistic therapeutic effect,” says Mishal Mendiratta-Lala, professor of radiology with Michigan Medicine and principal investigator of the trial.

HistoSonics can now market and sell its histotripsy delivery platform, called Edison, to hospitals and medical professionals for use in liver treatments. The company is headquartered in Minneapolis, while its advanced research and development is located in Ann Arbor.

Histotripsy works by using targeted ultrasound waves to form microbubbles within the tumor. The forces created as those bubbles form and collapse cause the mass to break apart, killing tumor cells and leaving the debris to be cleaned up by the immune system.

What that could mean for patients is treatment without the physical toll of radiation or chemotherapy, fewer concerns with drug compatibility, far shorter recovery times than with surgery, and less treatment discomfort.

This is possible because it is much easier to ensure that histotripsy treatments are hitting the tumor, and not healthy tissue, compared to radiation or invasive procedures. Histotripsy relies on focusing acoustic waves of high energy ultrasound to concentrate the energy enough to form bubbles, and the Edison machine can make sure that region is confined to the tumor. In contrast, radiation affects everything in its path through the body.

In addition, the histotripsy system has onboard diagnostic ultrasound imaging, the kind used to see babies in the womb. It is used to plan and observe the treatment in real time. Physicians have a live view of the “bubble cloud” and how tissue is responding to the therapy.

And histotripsy’s potential benefits go beyond tumor destruction. In the last year, a pair of preclinical studies in rodents suggest that in the clean-up process, the immune system learns how to identify cancer cells as threats. This can enable the body to continue fighting the initial tumor and help activate a natural immune response to the cancer.

In the first study, even after destroying only 50% to 75% of the liver tumor volume by histotripsy, the rats’ immune systems were able to clear away the rest, with no evidence of recurrence or metastases in more than 80% of animals.

Earlier this year, a second study showed that histotripsy breaks down the cancer cell wall’s “cloak”—revealing proteins that the immune system can use to identify threats, known as antigens. These antigens are removed during surgery or destroyed during chemotherapy and radiation. By instead destroying a cancer cell’s outer wall, histotripsy lays bare the tumor antigens for the immune system to identify and use for targeted attacks on other cancer cells.

“We want to leverage histotripsy’s immuno stimulation effects and hopefully combine them with immunotherapy or drug delivery,” says Zhen Xu, a professor of biomedical engineering, an inventor of the histotripsy approach, and a co-founder of HistoSonics.

“That will move histotripsy from a local therapy into one that can treat tumors globally all over the body and eventually into a cure. In terms of the cancer treatment, that will be the next step, and I feel very excited about the potential.”

Xu and the University of Michigan have a financial interest in HistoSonics. The company was formed with support from UM’s Coulter Translational Research Program and Innovation Partnerships, UM’s hub for research commercialization.

Source: University of Michigan

WASHINGTON — Urban Sky, a startup offering high-resolution imaging from small stratospheric balloons, has raised $9.75 million in a Series A round.

The Denver-based company announced the funding round Oct. 16, led by New Legacy Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Lavrock Ventures. Several other funds participated in the round, which the company said was oversubscribed.

Urban Sky, which raised $4.1 million in a seed round in August 2021, plans to use the funding to expand its imagery services. The company collects visible and long-wave infrared images using small balloons called “microballoons” by the company that operate in the stratosphere.

The funding will help the company move into markets outside of Colorado, where it operates today. “The primary use of funding is to build what will effectively be a very refreshed, very high-resolution picture of some major metro areas in the United States,” Andrew Antonio, chief executive of Urban Sky, said in an interview.

Urban Sky is still determining where it will expand its imagery services, he said, but will likely be focused on the central and western United States based on demand. The company currently flies one balloon a week but expects to increase that cadence to one every two to three days.

Urban Sky currently offers color imagery at a resolution of 10 centimeters, but Antonio said the company will use the funding to develop cameras capable of better resolution as well as new infrared cameras, all while fitting into the constraints of the microballoon system that limits payload mass to 2.7 kilograms.

The company has seen strong demand from different markets for its color imagery, including environmental monitoring, property insurance and the oil and gas industry, and expects to see interest from others as it expands it services. “We want to build this really strong catalog of very high resolution, very frequently updated imagery over major cities. That can help new applications come to light where people can query that data,” he said.

He argued that Urban Sky’s imagery does not compete directly with those from commercial satellites. “There are no satellites that capture imagery at our resolution, and the markets we serve require the resolution that we offer,” he said, noting the company has few customers who are using Urban Sky’s imagery to replace satellite imagery.

That could change, though, as the company expands. “In areas where we do operate, we can provide a better product at a better price that a lot of satellite operators,” he said. “Over time, maybe we’ll see more business come to us that are already using major satellite imagery providers.”

One of Urban Sky’s customers is Skywatch, which resells imagery from nearly 20 companies that operate satellites and aerial platforms. “SkyWatch is witnessing an unprecedented surge in demand for very high resolution Earth observation data,” said James Slifierz, chief executive of Skywatch, in a statement. “However, satellite-based supply constraints have significantly curtailed our ability to satisfy this growing appetite,” a gap he said Urban Sky can help fill.

Antonio said the company is exploring other uses of its microballoons, citing as an example testing of a mesh network communications system. “We view it in a lot of ways as a payload agnostic system,” he said of those microballoons, although the primary focus remains using them for imagery.

There is also interest in the microballoon platform from the Defense Department, which has awarded the company several Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer contracts. Some of that interest, he said, came after the Chinese “spy balloon” that floated across the United States early this year.

Urban Sky’s microballoons, he noted, are far smaller than the Chinese balloon. “We’ve very different in technology, but it’s made the business easier to communicate to people who are not familiar with ballooning.”

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Updated 12:45 p.m. Eastern about spacecraft establishing communications after launch.

WASHINGTON — A NASA spacecraft is finally on its way to a metallic main belt asteroid after a successful Falcon Heavy launch Oct. 13.

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:19 a.m. Eastern. Its payload, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, separated from the upper stage 62 minutes after liftoff. The launch was the eighth for the Falcon Heavy but the first by that rocket for NASA.

In a statement, NASA said controllers established two-way communications with the spacecraft at 11:50 a.m. Eastern, confirming the spacecraft was in good condition as it goes through initial post-launch commissioning.

Psyche is a Discovery-class planetary science mission whose destination is an object in the main asteroid belt also called Psyche. That asteroid is made primarily of metal and could be the core of a larger object whose outer layers were stripped away.

On its way to the asteroid, the Psyche spacecraft will conduct a technology demonstration. The Deep Space Optical Communications payload on the spacecraft will test the ability of lasers to provide high-bandwidth communications at interplanetary distances.

The launch took place more than a week into a three-week launch period. In late September NASA delayed the launch, once scheduled for Oct. 5, by a week after a review found concerns with the operating temperature of cold-gas thrusters used to maneuver the spacecraft. Engineers had to revise the operating parameters of the thrusters to avoid overheating.

“There would have been a potential risk of overheating the thrusters and damaging them” if the parameters were not changed, Henry Stone, Psyche project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at an Oct. 11 briefing. “It was a serious issue that we had to deal with.”

The changes involve a “select subset of parameters” to the thrusters, he said, but did not elaborate on the changes. Those changes, he said, will not affect Psyche’s operations once at the asteroid. “The changes affected some of the timeline margins that we already had, but we’ll conduct the same operations when we get to the body.”

NASA rescheduled the launch for Oct. 12, but postponed it another day because of poor weather. The launch period ran through Oct. 25, with instantaneous launch windows each day.

Earlier problems

Psyche was originally scheduled to launch in August 2022. Delays in testing the flight software, though, forced NASA to skip launch opportunities in August and October 2022. An independent review found that those testing delays were symptoms of broader institutional issues at JPL.

While the problems with both Psyche and JPL have been corrected, they affected several NASA science missions. The 14-month launch delay pushed back the spacecraft’s arrival at the asteroid from 2026 to August 2029. The mission’s cost also increased 20% from $1 billion to $1.2 billion.

Psyche’s delay also affected Janus, an asteroid smallsat mission that was to fly as a secondary payload on the launch. The delay meant that Janus could not fly its original mission to go by two pairs of binary asteroids, and the mission could not find suitable alternative targets with its revised trajectory. NASA announced in July it was canceling Janus and putting the completed spacecraft in storage.

The institutional issues at JPL uncovered in the independent review of Psyche’s delays led NASA to delay the next Discovery-class mission under development at JPL, the Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy, or VERITAS. That mission, selected in 2021 for launch in 2028, is now scheduled for launch no earlier than 2031.

The Psyche delay and budget increase added stress to the overall NASA planetary science program already dealing with challenges like Mars Sample Return. In the agency’s fiscal year 2024 budget request, NASA said it was postponing a heliophysics mission, the Geospace Dynamics Constellation, citing “high budgetary requirements” from other programs.

“A new kind of world”

NASA, and scientists involved with Psyche, said the mission is worth the wait and the additional cost. The spacecraft will spend 26 months orbiting at Psyche in four different orbits, studying the largest solar system body made primarily of metal.

“This will be our first time visiting a world that has a metal surface,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche principal investigator at Arizona State University, at a pre-launch briefing.

A key goal of the mission is to determine Psyche’s origins, said Ben Weiss, Psyche deputy principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We have two leading ideas about how Psyche formed,” he said, either as the core of a planetesimal that failed to become a planet, or as a primordial body enriched in metal for some reason.

“We are going to go into orbit around Psyche and measure its various properties at lower and lower altitudes,” he said. The spacecraft is equipped with a camera, gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer and magnetometer.

“It’s primary exploration of a new kind of world,” said Elkins-Tanton. “There aren’t that many completely unexplored types of worlds in our solar system to go see, so that is what is so exciting about this.”

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The nonprofit, previously known as NewSpace New Mexico, runs an incubator for space startups around the country called NewSpace Ignitor. Working with the Defense Innovation Unit, U.S. Space Force and Air Force Research Laboratory, NewSpace Nexus also hosts annual conferences and workshops.

NewSpace Nexus’ claim to fame, though, is Unite and Ignite Space, a “co-innovation hub” in Albuquerque funded by the State of New Mexico, Virgin Galactic, AFRL and the Space Force Rapid Capabilities Office. There, startups gain access to facilities, equipment, networking events and guidance. Entrepreneurs can learn, for example, how to pitch their ideas to investors or find potential government customers.

SpaceNews caught up with Casey DeRaad, the energetic founder and CEO of NewSpace Nexus. Prior to NewSpace Nexus, DeRaad led AFRL’s Tech Engagement Office, which links industry, academia and government agencies with AFRL scientists and engineers. Along with AFRL colleagues, DeRaad won the 2013 STEM Team Award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer.

What is NewSpace Nexus? And why is it no longer called NewSpace New Mexico?

Newspace Nexus is accelerating the pace of space innovation. We do this by both uniting and igniting the space industry. We bring together all the stakeholders to break down walls in collaborations. We also lead the State of the Space Industrial Base conferences and workshops. On the ignite side, thanks to some grants through the Air Force Research Lab and congressional funding, we’re able to help companies innovate faster. We’re trying to grow the commercial space innovation base from New Mexico for the nation.

Your organization was called NewSpace New Mexico. Why did you change the name?

We work with a number of companies to create this innovation pipeline. When we were called NewSpace New Mexico, a lot of people thought we only worked with New Mexico companies. Also, in leading these national industrial base conferences, some folks thought we were only talking about New Mexico. Even though our name changed, our vision remains the same: helping to put resources in place to grow the space industry. With our national efforts, we’re still doing a lot to grow the space industry here in New Mexico.

What is the NewSpace Ignitor?

New Mexico has a lot of great research and development, but companies need to get beyond research and development. With congressional funding, we set up collaborative facilities with workspaces, prototyping and conference areas. We also set up Ignitor, an industry demonstrator program. We help companies take their concepts to products and sales.

When companies come in, we do an assessment to figure out what resources they need. We are helping a couple of companies get rideshares. And we showcase companies to the money sources, whether that might be government contracts, investors or even large partners like primes.

We are concluding our first year of Ignitor. We have 23 space companies at different levels: Ignitor AA, Ignitor AAA and Ignitor Elite. We track attributable wins for companies. The 23 companies have gotten $17.7 million in government contracts or investments.

What is the NewSpace Alliance?

The NewSpace Alliance, one of our first initiatives that began in 2019, brings together space stakeholders: space companies; government, educational and research organizations; economic development and industry associations. Currently, there are 250 member organizations with 140 space companies. We have options for U.S. corporate members and individuals. We’ll start a global option in the next few months.

We have a growing list of individual members of the NewSpace Alliance. This is mainly to build a list for a future workforce connector on our website. The plan is that our Alliance organizations can post their job opportunities, and it will generate an email to the individual alliance list.

What are the opportunities for New Mexico’s space sector?

There are a lot of assets here. There’s a diverse workforce pipeline. New Mexico’s three research universities have 40 percent STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] graduates of color. There’s amazing intellectual property with the Los Alamos National Lab and Sandia National Lab. There are three space organizations with the Air Force Research Lab Space Vehicles Directorate, Space Systems Command’s Prototyping and Innovation Directorate and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office. Those three space organizations probably have at least a $2 billion budget.

Then, we have the Spaceport America. In our Ignitor program, we’ve had a number of innovative launch companies. We connect them to the Spaceport. It’s abutted to the White Sands Missile Range. Having that no-fly zone is another asset. There’s also the NASA White Sands Test Facility.

The bottom line is that there are lots of assets, lots of customers and a great workforce pipeline.

What challenges does New Mexico face in recruiting people to work in the space industry?

We’re a smaller state. We have a smaller population. Yet at the same time, New Mexico has the highest number of PhDs per capita. So, there’s access to a lot of brainpower.

Another challenge is awareness of the opportunity. We have an Intern Day. We bring together interns from New Mexico companies and organizations to show them that there’s a lot going on here. Rocket Lab is here. Virgin Galactic is here. Air Force Research Lab is here. One of the biggest challenges is telling the story of what all we have here. And we have to keep telling it.

The other challenge is with the space industry growing so much, there’s a lot of need for workforce. STEM is a big part, but we need all the different workforce areas. We need to get to that pipeline. We need to really expand that aperture to recruit our whole available workforce.

How is NewSpace Nexus trying to expand the workforce?

We’re leading a program called Pathways to the Stars. We’re trying to create the space industry sector’s first complete pathway from early education through early career. It includes participant support and industry engagement at each of the stages.

When I was at AFRL, I led their STEM outreach program. We had an internship program. We funded the University Nanosatellite Program. There were little pockets of great programs. With Pathways to the Stars, we’re starting in New Mexico, but the plan is that it can be expanded. We are first assessing what programs are in place, where there are gaps and where we might add programming. Or where there are good programs that we can amplify with more funding.

AFRL has an amazing K through 12 program. We wouldn’t reinvent that. We would work with the folks there and say, “How do we start putting in this structure to connect these different programs?”

We’re getting private companies to help support it. And we’re talking to the state. We have access to this whole industry innovation pipeline between our Ignitor companies, our NewSpace Alliance and all the companies that come to our Space Industrial Base conferences and workshops.

I tell the companies, “You can’t just think about the workforce when you’re doing job placement. You need to get in the trenches with us, whether you help with funding or with mentoring.” A number of companies are ready to start working with us.

You led the workforce study for the State of the Space Industrial Base report. What are some of the key takeaways?

We need this North Star vision for our national space workforce. It needs an all-of-government approach, and industry needs to be part of it as well. The National Science and Technology Council Committee on STEM education put together an interagency roadmap. It’s promising because it’s a government-wide look at how we deal with space-related STEM education and workforce.

We also need to be looking at new ways of getting the word out that there are many ways to get the right qualifications to make it into the space workforce. The four-year STEM degree is still important. But there are other ways.

One of the recommendations put forward is that we start implementing this Pathways to the Stars. Start in New Mexico but expand regionally. We’ve been running these Space Industrial Base conferences. We partnered with Space Northwest and Space Florida. NewSpace Nexus reached out to a number of organizations to put together a Space Industrial Base Council. We’re just getting it up and running.

This article originally appeared in the October 2023 issue of SpaceNews magazine.

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WASHINGTON — Despite satellite malfunctions that are expected to lead to major insurance claims, the space insurance field is taking a cautious approach to servicing technologies that might be able to repair such spacecraft.

In a talk at the Global Satellite Servicing Forum Oct. 12, Mark Quinn, chief executive of WTW Global Inspace, a space insurance broker, acknowledged that several high-profile satellite malfunctions and other incidents will result a major loss for the field in 2023.

“It’s the worst market we’ve been in in the last 20 years,” he said. “In the last six months there’s been about $1 billion in claims against about $500 million in premiums.”

Those claims will likely include two malfunctions of recently launched satellites. ViaSat-3 Americas, also known as ViaSat-3 F1, encountered a problem deploying its large antenna that will reduce the available capacity on that broadband satellite by more than 90%. Viasat reported a separate problem with the power subsystem with the Inmarsat-6 F2 satellite in August that raised questions about its ability to operate. A total loss of ViaSat-3 F1 could result in a $420 million insurance claim, while Inmarsat-6 F2 could result in a $350 million claim.

Those and other claims, such as satellites with malfunctioning electric propulsion systems, are creating what Quinn called a “market correction” for space insurance. The heavy losses in 2023 come after seven years of “very mediocre results” with little profit for insurers.

“When this bad year comes in, it causes the underwriters to look at the portfolio of all the business they write,” he said. “When they look at space, they’re reassessing how they’re going to approach this class of business in terms of how much capital they’re going to commit, what types of risk they’re going to underwrite and what premium rates they’re going to charge.”

Quinn spoke at a conference organized by CONFERS, an industry group promoting development of standards and best practices for satellite servicing and related applications. Some in the field have argued that satellite servicing could, in the long term, help reduce insurance claims, with insurers themselves potential customers of those services.

He suggested the space insurance field would take a cautious approach to satellite servicing given the lack of technical maturity and experience in the industry. Insurers, he noted, are looking for in-flight demonstrations and other flight-proven technologies, which he acknowledged is not always possible.

“In order to unlock significant capacity on new projects of very high value — new applications with hardware that actually hasn’t flown in orbit — we need to figure out a way to get insurers comfortable that something that is flying is going to work reliably the first time so they are willing to commit their capacity at a reasonable price with the coverage that is required,” he said.

Getting insurers comfortable with satellite servicing, he said, will be a long-term process. “They key is a multi-year, multi-touch process where you engage the insurance community, bring them in as a true partner,” he said, so they understand both the technology and the business opportunity.

As for whether insurers would be customers of satellite servicing, Quinn said it’s possible at some point. “It needs to be available, it needs to be reliable and it also needs to be cost effective,” he said of satellite servicing. “It needs to cost less than the alternative.”

Insurers, he added, may be open to eventually offering discounts on insurance policies for satellites designed to be more easily serviced. “The short answer is yes, but not right now,” he said, because of concerns about the effectiveness and cost of satellite servicing. “I do see that as something that could happen down the road.”

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HELSINKI — China added to its series of Yunhai remote sensing satellites late Saturday with a launch from the Gobi Desert.

A Long March 2D rocket lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 8:54 p.m. Eastern, Oct. 14 (0054 UTC, Oct. 15). The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), confirmed launch success within an hour, also revealing the payload for the mission to be Yunhai-1 (04). 

CASC’s Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology provided the launcher for the mission and developed the Yunhai-1 (04) satellite.

Chinese state media describe the satellite as providing “services for the detection of the atmospheric, marine and space environments, disaster prevention and mitigation, and scientific experiments.” This is a generally used description of Yunhai spacecraft

The Yunhai series are assessed to be military meteorological satellites by some Western analysts. 

China launched the first Yunhai satellite in November 2016. Yunhai-1 series satellites operate in roughly circular, 780-kilometer-altitude sun-synchronous orbits (SSO). The hypergolic Long March 2D has a launch capacity of 1,300 kilograms to a 700-kilometer SSO. Yunhai-2 series sats orbit with a similar altitude with inclinations of 50 degrees.  

Yunhai-1 (02), launched in 2019, suffered a suspected collision with a small piece of debris from a Russian satellite launch in March 2021. U.S. Space Force cataloged a total of 37 fragments in orbit, with 23 having reentered the atmosphere to date.

Yunhai-1 (04) was China’s 47th orbital launch of 2023. CASC stated early in the year it would aim to launch more than 60 times, and has so far completed 33 launches. Commercial firms have contributed to the launch total.

China has suffered one failure so far in 2023, seeing the loss of a Jilin-1 remote sensing satellite aboard a commercial Ceres-1 rocket from Galactic Energy.

China is currently preparing for the launch of the Shenzhou-17 crewed mission. That launch will see a new, three-person crew head to the Tiangong space station later in the month. The Shenzhou-16 trio currently aboard the space station will handover Tiangong to the Shenzhou-17 crew for the start of their six-month-long stay in orbit.

The country is also working towards the launch of its Einstein Probe, a wide-field x-ray space observatory designed to detect flashes from cataclysmic cosmic events.

The spacecraft passed thermal vacuum and other tests across July and August. China plans to launch it in December from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center using a Long March 2C rocket.

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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force is taking steps to bridge the gap between technology developers and operators, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman announced Oct. 13.

The Space Force will establish new “system delta” units in an effort to increase collaboration between units that use equipment and those that develop and acquire it, Saltzman said in a memo to the entire force.

The plan reflects Saltzman’s view that guardians operating satellites and ground systems should inform requirements for new systems and provide feedback during procurement.

The system delta concept is the second phase of a reorganization that Saltzman unveiled last month. Under a pilot program, the Space Force set up two integrated mission deltas — units overseeing all aspects of a mission area like training, procurement, and operations. One of the units will focus on electronic warfare and the other on positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) satellites. 

The new system deltas — aligned under the Space Systems Command — will work alongside the integrated mission deltas.

Goal to create feedback loop

As Saltzman explained, these new units will “directly complement integrated mission deltas by developing, acquiring, and fielding capability that satisfies operational needs.” For example, the electronic warfare mission delta can collaborate with its system delta counterpart, creating a feedback loop between users and developers.

The goal is to sync technological advancement with real-time operator input. The two provisional integrated mission deltas were formally established October 12 under the Space Operations Command. The system deltas will follow in the coming months.

Saltzman noted this closer linkage between operators and acquirers is “essential to the Space Force’s effort to forge a service built for great power competition.” He said “old ways of doing business will not produce the results we need” and this new structure can “accelerate the development, fielding, and presentation of combat-ready forces.”

The delta prototypes address just two missions for now but could expand to others in the future, a Space Force spokesperson told SpaceNews. The concept will be tested using existing personnel and resources, without relocating units or altering core Space Operations and Space Systems missions.

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WASHINGTON — Satellite operator Intelsat has signed an agreement with Relativity Space for multiple launches of that company’s Terran R reusable launch vehicle under development.

The two companies announced Oct. 11 they had signed a multi-year, multi-launch agreement for Terran R launches of Intelsat satellites starting no earlier than 2026, the year Relativity currently projects Terran R making its debut. The companies did not disclose the number of launches included in the agreement or the time span of the agreement.

The companies also did not disclose the value of the agreement, although Relativity Space said it now has a backlog of more than $1.8 billion from nine customers. The company said in April it had a backlog of $1.65 billion.

Intelsat, in a statement, praised Relativity for an “innovative design and production process” for Terran R, in the words of Luc Froeliger, senior vice president of space systems. However, the company didn’t go into details about why it procured multiple launches of a vehicle that is still about three years from its first launch.

One possibility is concerns about availability of launch given growing demand, particularly from low Earth orbit broadband constellations, and a supply of existing and new vehicles that is not keeping up. “The space industry clearly requires more commercially competitive, diversified and disruptive launch capacity,” Tim Ellis, chief executive of Relativity, said in the statement. “Relativity is developing Terran R as a customer-focused reusable launch vehicle to solve this need.”

That demand was one reason Relativity decided in April to discontinue its Terran 1 small launch vehicle that failed to reach orbit in its only launch in March. The company argued that the “biggest market opportunity” was at the heavy end of the market, which the Terran R, which can place up to 5,500 kilograms into geostationary transfer orbit while recovering the first stage, can serve.

“We see this big gap between supply and demand” at the heavy end of the launch market, said Josh Brost, senior vice president at Relativity Space, during a panel at World Satellite Business Week a month ago, adding that the company expected that imbalance to last “for a very long time.”

He said the experience from the Terran 1, including building up a team and key technologies like additive manufacturing, will translate to the Terran R. “It led to us learning how do you design a system, how do you operate a system, how do you qualify it, all of which feeds into Terran R to give us a much better understanding of how long is it going to take for us to develop this much larger launch system that’s much more capable.”

Relativity has provided few updates on the development of Terran R since the April announcement it was discontinuing the Terran 1, which also revealed design changes in the Terran R since the company first announced plans to develop it in 2021.

Ellis, in a prerecorded presentation aired at the 26^th Annual International Mars Society Convention Oct. 8, said the company was making good progress on the Terran R. “We are 100% focused on Terran R. Of our 1,000-person team or so we have now, everybody is working on Terran R and the 3D-printing technology that supports Terran R,” he said.

He said Relativity expects to complete a preliminary design review of Terran R near the end of this year or early next year, and has recently performed its 500^th engine test. “We’re on track for first launch in 2026,” he said.

Ellis explained that one reason for pressing ahead with Terran R was a lack of competition for SpaceX in the launch market. “Eight years after founding Relativity, there is still not a second great commercial launch company,” he said. “It’s clear on the commercial side there is still not really an obvious second player that is just as quickly moving, low cost, and has a very capable launch vehicle in the heavy-lift payload class.”

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Rocket Lab had been on an upwards trajectory for the first eight and a half months of the year. The company conducted its first Electron launches from Launch Complex 2 on Wallops Island, Virginia, and flew a new suborbital version of the rocket, called HASTE, to tap into the hypersonics testing market. The company was planning to fly up to 15 Electrons in 2023, compared to nine in 2022. It also made strides toward its goal of reusing the Electron first stage, such as flying a reused Rutherford engine.

But, as many in the launch industry often say, you’re only as good as your most recent launch. On Sept. 19, those plans came plummeting back to Earth — literally.

On that day, an Electron lifted off from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, carrying the second in a series of Acadia radar imaging satellites for Capella Space. The first stage appeared to work as planned, but video from the rocket was lost moments after stage separation. Telemetry displayed on the launch webcast showed the rocket’s speed decreasing, suggesting the upper stage’s single engine was not working.

About 45 seconds after stage separation, the launch director delivered the bad news: “All stations, we have experienced an anomaly.”

The company has provided few details about exactly what went wrong. “We’ll find it, fix it and be back on the pad quickly,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, posted on social media a few hours after the failure.

Rocket Lab had emerged as the leader of the Western small launch market as others struggled. Some companies suffered launch failures, while others faced financial setbacks, most notably Virgin Orbit, which went bankrupt this spring.

Those technical and financial problems left developers of small satellites with few options to launch. The customer that was going to launch next on Electron after Capella Space was Japanese radar imaging company iQPS, which switched to Rocket Lab earlier this year after Virgin Orbit’s failure: it had been next to fly on LauncherOne when Virgin went under. Northstar Earth and Space, a Canadian company developing a constellation of satellites to collect space situational awareness data, had also switched to Rocket Lab after Virgin Orbit’s failure, with its satellites expected to launch on Electron before the end of the year.

The lack of launch options has become frustrating to some companies. “We have a duopoly, right? It’s just two of those guys,” said John Serafini, chief executive of HawkEye 360, a company that operates a constellation to perform radio-frequency geolocation. The company has launched its satellites both on Electrons and on SpaceX Transporter rideshare missions.

He had no complaints about the performance of either company but lamented the lack of options from others. “Either by bankruptcy or by delays, so many launch companies just haven’t gotten there yet and haven’t demonstrated repeatable success that will give us confidence to put our satellites on those launch options,” he said in an interview during World Satellite Business Week a week before the Electron failure.

And now, at least temporarily, that duopoly has become a monopoly.

RocketLab’s remaining 2023 manifest before Sept. 19 failure

“SpaceX is probably the monopolist right now”

Even before the Rocket Lab failure, people were tossing around the word “monopoly” when it came to SpaceX. It had become increasingly clear that companies needing to launch their satellites in the near future had few options beyond SpaceX, particularly those spacecraft too large to launch on a small vehicle like Electron, as other launch providers stumbled.

SpaceX’s dominance in the launch market became an unofficial theme of World Satellite Business Week, starting with the very first panel. “Having such a dominant launch service provider is probably not healthy in general for the commercial prospects of the industry,” said Vikram Nidamaluri, managing director of the telecom, media, and entertainment group at investment banking firm Lazard. “No one wants a monopoly choking off one point of the value chain.”

He suggested that increased government investment might be needed to bolster competition in the launch market. “I think critical and continued increases in government budgets focused on space and communications are going to be essential to pushing forward technologies,” he said, “and maybe even enabling a second or third launch company.”

One of SpaceX’s customers agreed that the company effectively had a monopoly on the market. “Let’s face it, SpaceX is probably the monopolist right now,” said Luca Rossettini, chief executive of D-Orbit, a company that has flown several orbital transfer vehicles carrying smallsats and hosted payloads on SpaceX Transporter missions.

That was, he added, no fault of SpaceX itself. “Not because they wanted to, but because of many other situations that created this scenario.”

Even if SpaceX has a commercial launch monopoly, a separate question is whether the company is acting like a monopolist, using its market power in an anti-competitive manner. Answers to that depend on where other companies sit in the market.

Some small launch companies argue that SpaceX has acted anti-competitively in the market by pricing its Transporter launches so low that their vehicles can’t compete. 

“SpaceX came with these Transporter missions, which have been really disrupting,” said Marino Fragnito, senior vice president of the Vega business unit at Arianespace. They have been a boon for smallsat developers, he acknowledged, offering low-cost access to space. “But at the same time, they have created a big problem in terms of the business case for all of the other players.”

He accused SpaceX of, in effect, predatory pricing, willing to lose money on Transporter missions to drive out competition. He noted that past Vega smallsat rideshare missions sold payloads at $25,000 per kilogram, whereas SpaceX has sold Transporter launches for one-fifth that price. “It’s crazy.”

“I think the level of pricing they introduced was not sustainable,” Fragnito concluded, suggesting it led to the demise of Virgin Orbit and financial problems at other companies. “Launcher companies could not live with that level of pricing.”

Customers of SpaceX, though, say they are satisfied with the company’s launch pricing and availability. That has included those competing with SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation, who have increasingly turned to SpaceX for launch given the lack of near-term options.

An example is Telesat, which announced on the first day of the conference, Sept. 11, that it had signed a contract with SpaceX for 14 Falcon 9 launches of its Lightspeed constellation in 2026 and 2027. Telesat had previously announced contracts with Blue Origin and Relativity Space for launches of Lightspeed satellites.

“Given the dedication and professionalism of the SpaceX team, and their outstanding track record of reliability and demonstrated high launch cadence, I have the utmost confidence that they will be an outstanding partner in helping us bring Telesat Lightspeed into service in a timely and low-risk manner,” Dan Goldberg, chief executive of Telesat, said in a statement about the contract.

The Telesat deal, as well as recent contracts to launch satellites for Globalstar and Rivada Space Networks, were evidence that, even if SpaceX had a launch monopoly, it was not acting like a monopolist, argued a company executive.

“We’ve proven that we’re a launch company first. We’re here to provide launches,” said Tom Ochinero, vice president of commercial sales at SpaceX. While the company’s launch manifest is dominated by Starlink, “they’ve proven to move out of the way as needed sometimes” to free up launches for other customers.

“I’m 100% here to say I’m not super worried about this,” he said of concerns SpaceX held a monopoly.

One major commercial satellite constellation under development that has avoided SpaceX is Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which announced contracts a year and a half ago with Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance to launch its 3,236-satellite constellation. However, those contracts involve vehicles that have, so far, yet to perform a single launch.

Amazon is now facing a shareholder lawsuit because of those launch contracts. The suit, filed in a Delaware court in August by a Cleveland-based pension fund that owns Amazon stock, argued that Amazon’s board failed to perform proper due diligence in approving those launch contracts, in part because Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos, was funding Blue Origin, also owned by Jeff Bezos.

The suit also claims that the board failed to consider SpaceX for launching Kuiper satellites. “Despite being the launch provider with the most proven track record and the lowest prices in the industry, SpaceX was seemingly not considered by Amazon,” the suit states, which “likely committed Amazon to spending hundreds of millions of dollars more than it would have otherwise had to.”

Restoring competition

Amazon has said those suit’s claims are without merit. Naveen Kachroo, head of product management and business development for Project Kuiper at Amazon, offered no concerns at the conference about the ability of Arianespace, Blue Origin and ULA to meet a July 2026 FCC deadline of launching half its constellation.

Those launch companies also said they were ramping up production to meet the needs of Kuiper and other customers, even if the first launches of their vehicles — once planned for 2020 — remained uncertain. Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, was the most specific, offering a December launch date for the inaugural Vulcan Centaur after having corrected a problem with the Centaur upper stage discovered in a test this spring.

The first Ariane 6 launch is now planned for some time in 2024, but Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said a more specific date would come only after a long-duration static-fire test of the Ariane 6 core stage in French Guiana, then scheduled for Oct. 3.

However, ESA announced Sept. 21 that test would be delayed because of a problem with the thrust vector control system in the rocket. The agency did not announce a new date for the test.

Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, was also vague about a first launch of New Glenn other than that the company planned “multiple” launches of the vehicle next year.

“We intend to meet our contractual requirements in ’24,” he said. Blue Origin’s New Glenn contracts include one with NASA for the launch of the ESCAPADE Mars smallsat mission, which project officials have previously said is planned for August 2024.

It’s clear, though, that there is increasing urgency among those launch companies to get flying. Blue Origin announced Sept. 25 that its chief executive, Bob Smith, was stepping down after six years, to be replaced by Dave Limp, an Amazon executive whose portfolio included Project Kuiper. “Dave has an outstanding sense of urgency, brings energy to everything, and helps teams move very fast,” Bezos said in a message announcing the change.

Other companies are planning to offer vehicles against SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. The first H3 rocket failed in March, but Iwao Igarashi, vice president and general manager of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, said at the conference he expected the rocket to return to flight by the end of the year, having incorporated corrective actions demonstrated with a successful H-2A launch in early September.

Rocket Lab is also seeking to compete directly with SpaceX with its larger Neutron rocket. Adam Spice, chief financial officer of the company, said at World Satellite Business Week that the company was still targeting a first launch of Neutron in late 2024.

“The market really does need another high-volume-capable, cost-effective medium launch option,” he said, citing the delays in vehicles from Arianespace, Blue Origin and ULA. “We hope to be the one that provides that incremental lift capability to the market.”

Rocket Lab, though, must first overcome its near-term Electron problem. That rocket has now failed three times since July 2020, all involving its upper stage, raising questions about its reliability as well as the company’s ability to ramp up production.

One analyst played down the effects of the Electron failure on the company. “Investors appreciate the fact that Rocket Lab is delivering on its core service by launching regularly, while also working to expand its capabilities through reusability, a larger vehicle and spacecraft manufacturing,” said Micah Walter-Range, president of space consulting firm Caelus Partners.

“As long as the company continues to show progress on these fronts, a single failure after a string of successes is unlikely to be catastrophic from a market perspective,” he concluded.

The risks of a single failure are magnified for a dominant launch provider like SpaceX. “A fleet-wide disruption to the Falcon 9 fleet for an issue of some type will have a big ripple effect,” warned John Rood, chief executive of Momentus, which has flown its tugs on Transporter missions. While he said he admired SpaceX’s reliability record, “we’ve all been in the space industry for a while. Things will happen. This will not be perfect.”

Customers like HawkEye 360’s Serafini are also looking for more competition in the small launch market. “We’re eager for companies that have been nearly there for several years to get there, so we can have more options and at least drive down the pricing for some of these other existing options.”

ULA’s Bruno emphasized that point on a panel with SpaceX’s Ochinero. “As much, Tom, as I appreciate the sentiment that you will be a benevolent monopoly, I don’t think you’re a monopoly,” he said. “I don’t think it’s our plan for you to become a monopoly.”

This article originally ran in the October issue of SpaceNews magazine.

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