Weekly Recap #45 + VXB Aerospace Interview

This week we interviewed Alexander Ryan, Co-Founder and CEO of VXB Aerospace, following their $4M raise! Listen to an excerpt in the podcast, and subscribe to be notified when our full coverage drops later this week. Main Topics Communications * Spain committed $2.3B to building national military communication satellites to contribute to Europe’s IRIS2 constellation. [source] * SpaceX won $1.6B in launch orders from National Security Space Launch (NSSL) for 18 Falcon-9 launches of Airborne Mobile Target Indicator (AMTI) satellites. [source] * The FCC planned an upper C-band auction for next year, selling 160MHz from 3.98-4.14GHz to SES, Eutelsat, and Telesat. [source] * Amazon filed for 5,105 Direct-to-Device (D2D) satellites using Globalstars L-band spectrum in combination with their S-band spectrum. [source] * Sphinx Defense won $287M for strategic communications software. [source] Propulsion * Spinlaunch rebranded to Meridian Space pivoting from launch to communication constellations. [source] * USSF awarded All Points $250M to expand commercial satellite processing at Vandenberg launch base. [source] * Rocket Lab won $266M from the USSF 12-18 HASTE launches out of their new Kodiak launch site. [source] * Nordspace funded its second company, North Vector Dynamics, for Canadian sovereign missile development. [source] * Impulse unveiled their Electra electric propulsion thruster. [source] Monitoring * Array Labs raised $21M anchored by Mitsubishi Electric for AMTI satellites capable of tracking aircraft, ships, and spacecraft. [source] * Orbes unveils Exo-Orb and agreement with Symphony Space to fly the spacecraft as a monitoring and maintenance solution. [source] * Chinese startup Xingchen Daohe raised $14M for Space Situation Awareness (SSA) constellation. [source] * Spaceflux identified a breakup of Intelsat 805 in graveyard orbit. [source] * Intermap spent $11M to acquire PCI Geometics for their geospatial intelligence platform. [source] * Galaxeye’s Drishti officially died on orbit due to a solar storm last month. [source] Business Moves * SSC awarded $981M for space test-and-training to Firefly, Redwire, Rocket Lab, and York Space Systems [source] * The USSF selected 29 companies for Adaptive and Intelligent Space Challenge to develop emerging technologies in orbital compute, sensing, and orchestration. [source] * K2 raised $500M in a Series D led by Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ to scale production to 100 large satellites per year. [source] * The Exploration Company announced plan to raise $300M at $2B valuation for the Nyx crewed capsule. [source] * Outlier Space raised $7.3M led by GD1 for their reusable capsules/ [source] Tech Advances * Katalyst’s Link spacecraft loses 2 reaction wheels, jeopardizing their mission to boost NASA’s SWIFT observatory. [source] * Intel debuted their new Starfire system-on-a-chip for AI in space. [source] Get full access to Space Times at spacetimespod.substack.com/subscribe