Tag: commercial

Firefly’s stock sells at price higher than expected

8:54 am

Firefly began selling stock to the public today on the Nasdaq stock market, with the price per share immediately rising to $45 per share, above the expected range of $41-$43, suggesting it could raise as much as$868 million in investment capital.

The strong interest in the stock by investors suggests there is great confidence in the company’s future, following the successful landing of its Blue Ghost lunar lander earlier this year. It has won a total of four lander contracts from NASA. The company also has won both commercial and NASA contracts in connection with its Elytra orbital tug. It has had mixed results with its Alpha rocket, experiencing both launch failures as well as successes, but it is also developing a larger rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman.

This enthusiasm is noteworthy in that the company is not yet in the black, though its revenues have been increasing.

For the quarter that ended in March, Firefly reported a net loss of about $60.1 million, widening from $52.8 million in the year-ago period. Revenue jumped sixfold to $55.9 million from $8.3 million. Its backlogged totaled about $1.1 billion.

Overall it appears Firefly’s future is solid, suggesting it will join SpaceX and Rocket Lab as a major new space player in the coming years.

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Astroscale awarded patent for its space junk removal technology

9:03 am

Astroscale's patented design
Astroscale’s patented design. Click for original.

The Japanese orbital tug and space junk removal startup Astroscale was awarded a U.S. patent in late July for its space junk removal technology.

Under this new patented method, the servicer docks with a debris object (the “client”) and transfers it to a reentry shepherd vehicle in a lower orbit. Once the client is docked with the shepherd, the servicer separates and proceeds to engage a new client, while the shepherd safely guides the initial client into Earth’s atmosphere for reentry. This process repeats, allowing the servicer to remove multiple large debris objects over the course of its mission.

Astroscale’s architecture also supports flexible mission profiles: the shepherd can remain docked through reentry, undocked after performing reentry insertion and returned to orbit, or in some cases, missions can proceed without a shepherd vehicle at all. This adaptability is essential in addressing the diverse size and risk profile of objects in orbit.

The company notes that this technology, which the image suggests will use robot arms to grab its targets, will allow its spacecraft to remove not only inactive satellites that were launched with docking equipment already attached but also rocket bodies and older satellites without that docking capability.

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NASA awards small orbital tug study contracts to six companies

8:35 am

NASA yesterday awarded six companies small study contracts in connection with orbital tug operations, with some to study using their rocket upper stage for this purpose while others to see how they can refine the use of their tugs.

The press release was not entirely clear on how much money was involved in each contract, though in each case the amounts are relatively small.

The firm-fixed-price awards comprise nine studies with a maximum total value of approximately $1.4 million. The awardees are:

Arrow Science and Technology LLC, Webster, Texas [tug study]
Blue Origin LLC, Merritt Island, Florida [both tug and upper stage studies]
Firefly Aerospace Inc., Cedar Park, Texas [tug study]
Impulse Space Inc., Redondo Beach, California [tug study]
Rocket Lab, Long Beach, California [both tug and upper stage studies]
United Launch Services LLC, Centennial, Colorado [upper stage study]

The studies are expected to be finished by September 2025, and will be used by NASA to determine how it will get some of its future spacecraft to their intended orbits.

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Echostar issues contract to build satellites for direct-to-phone constellation

1:19 pm

Echostar has awarded the satellite company MDA Space a $1.3 billion contract to build the first 100 satellites in its proposed direct-to-phone constellation that will compete directly with the constellations of SpaceX’s Starlink and AST SpaceMobile.

The initial contract, valued at approximately US$1.3 billion (approx. C$1.8 billion), includes the design, manufacturing and testing of over 100 software-defined MDA AURORA™ D2D satellites. With contract options, enabling a full initial configuration of a network of over 200 satellites, the value of the contract would increase to an approximate total value of US$2.5 billion (approx. C$3.5 billion). EchoStar envisions future growth to thousands of satellites, as demand requires, to provide global talk, text and broadband services directly to standard 5G handheld devices.

The constellation will be fully compliant with the newly created NTN and 3GPP standards, allowing EchoStar to provide messaging, voice, broadband data, and video services upon launch to all phones configured to this standard, without modifications. Additionally, the constellation will connect to an array of sensor and mobile vehicles.

All three constellations are designed to provide cell service in areas where there are no cell towers. The satellites themselves become the cell towers, in orbit.

Since most people today access the internet via their smartphones, I can see these direct-to-phone constellations eventually becoming the prime method for accessing the web. Why have a separate provider for your web services when these constellations can give you that as well as phone service. It is for this reason I suspect Echostar is jumping on the bandwagon.

This move also suggests the older Starlink and Kuiper constellations, that only provide web service, are going to eventually get superseded. For Starlink this isn’t really a threat, as it is already beginning the transition to this new technology and can likely shift its millions of customers to it easily when the time comes. For Amazon’s Kuiper constellation, however, it appears it might be arriving too late in the game.

More proof that in capitalism speed is essential. Amazon has simply moved too slowly in launching its constellation.

Hat tip Btb’s stringer Jay.

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Endeavour launched successfully, carrying four astronauts to ISS

9:03 am

SpaceX’s Endeavour Dragon capsule has been successfully placed in orbit carrying four astronauts to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Kennedy in Florida.

This is Endeavour’s sixth flight. It will dock at ISS in the early hours tomorrow. The first stage completed third flight, landing back in Florida.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

96 SpaceX
41 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 96 to 71.

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Gin Blossoms – Hey Jealousy

6:02 pm

An evening pause: Hat tip Wayne DeVette, who notes, “The band’s name comes from a photo of W.C. Fields in Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon, which bore the caption ‘W.C. Fields with gin blossoms’, referring to the actor’s telangiectasia-spotted face and rhinophymic nose by the slang term for the skin condition known as rosacea.”

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SpaceX launches 19 more Starlink satellites

3:35 pm

Only a few hours after it scrubbed the launch of its Endeavour capsule carrying four astronauts to ISS because of weather at Kennedy in Florida, SpaceX proceeded to successfully launch 19 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The relatively low number of Starlink satellites on this launch appears related to the higher orbit in which they were placed. The first stage completed its 27th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. SpaceX now has four boosters that have flown more than 25 times, respectively 29, 27, 26, and 26.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

95 SpaceX
41 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 95 to 71. Meanwhile, the manned Endeavour launch has now been rescheduled for tomorrow morning.

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The word that best describes our present NASA lunar program is “delusional.”

12:16 pm

Artemis, a program based on fantasy
Artemis, a program based on fantasy

Increasingly it appears everyone in Congress, the White House, and NASA, as well as our bankrupt mainstream press, has become utterly divorced from reality in talking about NASA’s Artemis lunar program. The claims are always absurd and never deal with the hard facts on the ground. Instead, it is always “Americans are piorneers! We are great at building things! We are going to beat China to the Moon!”

An interview of interim NASA administration (and Transportation secretary) Sean Duffy yesterday on the Sean Hannity Show made all these delusions very clear. First Hannity introduced Duffy by stating with bald-faced ignorance that “NASA has a brand-new program. It is called Artemis that aims to get astronauts back on the Moon in the next couple of years.”

I emphasize “brand-new” because anyone who has done even two seconds of research on the web will know that Artemis has existed now for more than a decade. Hannity illustrates his incompetence right off the bat.

Duffy then proceeds to insist that the next Artemis mission, dubbed Artemis-2, will fly in April 2026 and send four astronauts around the Moon, followed by the Artemis-3 manned landing one year later.

Being an incompetent member of the propaganda press, Hannity of course accepts these claims without question. He fails to question Duffy about the serious issues with the Orion heat shield, which experienced extensive unexpected damage that is still not understood during its return on the first Artemis mission in 2022.

Nor does either Duffy or Hannity mention the fact that for Artemis to land humans on the Moon SpaceX’s Starship not only has to become operational for human passengers, it needs an in-orbit refueling capability that does not yet exist. I have full confidence that SpaceX will eventually succeed in achieving these benchmarks, but I also doubt it will be able to do it by mid-2027, as claimed by Duffy.

Duffy and Hannity however are not alone in living in this dream world. » Read more

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California Coastal Commission to reconsider SpaceX’s Vandenberg launch proposal

10:12 am

The California Coastal Commission has now scheduled a meeting on August 14, 2025 to reconsider SpaceX’s request to double its launch rate at Vandenberg Space Force Base from 50 to 100 launches per year.

Though it has no real authority over the base, and though the Space Force has indicated it has no objections to SpaceX’s proposal, the commission rejected that increase in a 6-4 vote in October 2024, but did so not because the commissioners thought it would harm California’s beaches, but because they did not like Elon Musk’s endorsement and campaigning for Donald Trump during the election campaign.

SpaceX has subsequently sued, with a judge ruling two weeks ago that the suit can go forward. Based on the statements made by commissioners in October, SpaceX has an excellent case, and will likely win in court.

It appears the commission is now acting to possibly stave off that suit. The article at the link also notes that the make-up of the commission has changed since that October meeting, with at least one of the commissioners who expressed the most hate against Elon Musk, Gretchen Newsom, is no longer a member.

At the same time, the hostility to Musk and SpaceX for environmental reasons appears to still exist within the commission. Either way, in the end SpaceX’s launch rate at Vandenberg is going to increase, since the military is agreeable to the change.

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