Category: satellite

Spaceflight Industries to sell its satellite rideshare launch business to Japan’s Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa

Spaceflight Industries, owner of both Spaceflight, Inc. and BlackSky, is selling the Spaceflight, Inc. portion of its business to Japanese industrial megacorporation Mitsui & Co, and Yamasa both of which will co-own the company in a 50/50 joint venture after its closing. The deal will see Spaceflight continue to operate…

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Max Q: A SpaceX spin-out sounds great

Max Q is a new weekly newsletter all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Sundays in your inbox. Two rocket launches were set to take off Sunday, including one from Wallops Island in Virginia and another from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first is a relatively…

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Max Q: SpaceX’s Starlink constellation grows again

Max Q is a new weekly newsletter all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Sundays in your inbox. This week was the busiest yet for space-related news in 2020, thanks in part to the 23rd Annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference that happened last week. The…

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Rocket startup Astra emerges from stealth, aims to launch for as little as $1M per flight

There’s yet another new rocket launch startup throwing its hat in the ring – Astra, an Alameda-based company that’s actually been operating in stealth mode (though relatively openly, often referred to as ‘Stealth Space Company’) for the past three years developing and testing its launch vehicle. Astra revealed its business…

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Rocket Lab points out that not all rideshare rocket launches are created equal

The commercial rideshare model for spacefaring cargo is increasingly popular, and for good reason: It lowers the cost of launching something to space even further than companies like SpaceX have managed by splitting the available space on a rocket among multiple customers. Last August, SpaceX announced that it would be…

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Virgin Orbit teams with ISI on rapid response satellite launch services for intelligence customers

Small satellite launch company Virgin Orbit is teaming up with Israel’s ImageSat International (ISI) to develop a launch services that would be able to deliver small satellite-based Earth observation on remarkably short notice, basically anywhere in the world. This is a service aimed specifically at national security and intelligence customers,…

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