Impulse’s first demo space tug scheduled for launch
Impulse Space announced on January 4, 2023 that it has now scheduled the launch of its first demo space tug, Mira, for the fourth quarter of 2023.
Impulse Space said its LEO Express-1 mission, using a transfer vehicle it is developing called Mira, is manifested for launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 rideshare mission currently scheduled for launch in the fourth quarter of 2023. LEO Express-1 will carry a primary payload for an undisclosed customer.
Barry Matsumori, chief operating officer of Impulse Space, said in an interview that the mission can accommodate additional payloads, like cubesats. The mission profile is still being finalized, but he said the vehicle, after making some initial deployments, may raise its orbit, then lower it to demonstrate operations in what’s known as very low Earth orbit, around 300 kilometers.
After this demonstration flight the company has plans for additional flights in 2024. This tug will then join a growing fleet of companies offering this orbital transport capability to cubesats.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Impulse Space announced on January 4, 2023 that it has now scheduled the launch of its first demo space tug, Mira, for the fourth quarter of 2023.
Impulse Space said its LEO Express-1 mission, using a transfer vehicle it is developing called Mira, is manifested for launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 rideshare mission currently scheduled for launch in the fourth quarter of 2023. LEO Express-1 will carry a primary payload for an undisclosed customer.
Barry Matsumori, chief operating officer of Impulse Space, said in an interview that the mission can accommodate additional payloads, like cubesats. The mission profile is still being finalized, but he said the vehicle, after making some initial deployments, may raise its orbit, then lower it to demonstrate operations in what’s known as very low Earth orbit, around 300 kilometers.
After this demonstration flight the company has plans for additional flights in 2024. This tug will then join a growing fleet of companies offering this orbital transport capability to cubesats.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
A question for you Bob, or indeed any of the readers here ” in the know…
Where is all this start up money coming from? I can see a business case made for de-orbiting/ re-boosting leo objects, I can see a very long term investment case for asteroid exploration, but is the money genuinely out there right now to make a case for lunar rovers, space stations, etc,?
Perhaps I should wing this question by Dr Livingston, he’s the business guy, but I just find it hard to believe that there are enough “black sky” investors (I will claim that term as my own ,;-) to fund such a massive expansion into space.
Font get me wrong… I love it! I just wonder where the money is coming from without government help…
Lee,
We finally got to hear your voice this week. To answer your question, yes, the money is out there. There are lots of start up companies that are trying different concepts to do orbital debris mitigation, reboosting satellites, or refueling satellites. Bob has done a few stories on these in past, and the last one I can think of was AstroScale. That company is spread across the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. They recently got funding from the JAXA for debris mitigation.
Where is the money coming from for these programs? The usual sources: companies that want to keep their satellites alive, military, and of course governments.
Jay asked and answered: “Where is the money coming from for these programs? The usual sources: companies that want to keep their satellites alive, military, and of course governments.”
’There is far more capital available outside of NASA [for use by the commercial-space marketplace] than there is inside of NASA.’
— paraphrased from an interview with NASA Administrator Bridenstine on the Ben Shapiro radio show on Monday 3 August 2020.
There are many investors who are eager to invest in space ventures. SpaceX recently found investors willing to put up 3/4 billion dollars and over the past five years had found investors willing to put up several billion dollars for both Starship and Starlink.
Not all space ventures pay off, however, so these investors need to be careful where they invest and need to diversify into several different space companies that they believe are going to do well. It is a rarity that a company becomes one in which the investors should “back up the truck” (to the loading dock) and fill up with that company’s stock. Virgin Galactic had seemed like a sure winner in the early years, had seemed a bit troubled in the middle years, and now seems like it may not do well at all (but hopefully will turn around and do well).
Investors are putting lot of money into various space companies, from communication and observation companies to launch companies to exploration companies to space station and space services companies (e.g. tugs, refueling, and life-extension spacecraft). To earn their revenues, many companies are putting up smallsats to do a variety of other missions.
There are still plenty of governments around the world that want their own space programs, and they are willing to spend government money on commercial services (launch, unmanned spacecraft, manned spacecraft taxi services, space station rentals) to support these space programs. These customers and potential customers are currently driving the investment in these space companies, but as the various space companies grow in number, the revenues generated by serving each other will help drive the investment even further. As space services and space-made goods start being sold to the general public, these revenues will drive the investment in space.
Bridenstine may have been talking about the amount of capital available, but even larger is the amount of customers outside of NASA, other U.S. government agencies, and foreign governments. There are only a couple of hundred countries, but there are eight billion people and their companies, universities, and other organizations that can benefit from space products — goods and services that are not being provided by national space agencies but will be provided by privately owned commercial companies.
As an analogy, how many restaurants would there be if government was the only available customer? How many baseballs would be made if government was the only available customer? In fact, if government were the only customer, the only goods and services produced would be what government wanted, not what We the People want. What government wanted is pretty much all that we got for the first four decades of the space age.
From 1960 to 2000, virtually the only industry that supplied space services to the general public was the communication industry, and almost all the rest of the space companies provided goods or services to mostly government customers. The vast majority of space spending was by governments. Communication is the low-hanging fruit in the space business. The communication industry discovered that people are willing to pay the price to have worldwide communications.
In 1999, Ikonos was the first commercial observation company and satellite, braving the high cost of launch and taking a role that had only been done by governments before then. In the following decade, the 2000s, several other companies formed and made satellites to make observations from space, selling the information to a wide variety of customers, not just to government customers. Now, a quarter-century later, scores of companies are launching satellites to perform many functions in space, and their customers are increasingly not governments.
In the 1990s, commercial launch customers (largely, only the communication companies) begged for lower cost launch vehicles. Government was not eager for low cost launches, so the commercial customers didn’t get this price break until the 2010s, when commercial launch companies that were interested in non-governmental customers found efficiencies that allowed for reduced launch prices (e.g. Rocket Lab and SpaceX). With these reduced prices, even more companies found that they could afford to launch their satellites so that they, too, could make profits in space.
This video is six years old, we are behind its schedule, and ULA has abandoned the ACES and Xeus ideas, but this is the basic idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxftPmpt7aA (7 minutes, ULA’s “CisLunar-1000”)
Something like this is what the investors are seeing as the future of the space industry, and this is why they are so eager to invest. It is new territory, which is rare, and it has tremendous potential, which is rare. Predictions are that the space economy will increase to several trillion dollars in the next quarter century, putting it in one of the top industries. Getting in on the ground floor is an investor’s dream, and there seems to be a lot of dreaming investors.