Space Commerce Week

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A weekly newsletter published to the community highlighting the news of the week and letting you know who our podcast guest is that week. We will look ahead to the coming week to see what's happening and let you know. www.exterrajsc.com

  1. 3d ago

    NASA’s Shrinkage and Your Business, and a Coming Crunch at the Nation’s Spaceports

    Stockholm-based private equity firm EQT has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Exolaunch, a Germany-based satellite deployment technology and launch mission management company, marking the investment firm’s first move into the space sector. The acquisition is being made through EQT’s X fund, with the transaction expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2026. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Exolaunch has deployed more than 790 satellites across 47 missions for more than 200 commercial and government customers. The company has maintained a strategic relationship with SpaceX since 2020, participating in every Falcon 9 Transporter and Bandwagon rideshare mission since those programs began, and recently secured its first dedicated Falcon 9 launches, missions designated Exo-1 and Exo-2, scheduled for 2027 and 2028. -0- MDA Space has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Blue Canyon Technologies from RTX’s Raytheon business for $620 million in an all-cash transaction. Blue Canyon has launched more than 85 spacecraft and has more than 3,500 products on orbit. The company employs more than 400 people across two manufacturing facilities in Denver, CO. The transaction is fully committed and financed through senior secured debt at signing. MDA Space expects the deal to close by the end of 2026, pending customary closing conditions and required regulatory approvals. At current exchange rates, the purchase price represents an enterprise value of approximately 874 million Canadian dollars. -0- The European Space Agency has selected the NUVIEW Moonraker mission for a Phase A study under ESA’s Small Missions for Exploration, Destination the Moon program, moving the Berlin-based company’s lunar terrain mapping effort into a formal feasibility phase. NUVIEW serves as prime contractor and leads an international consortium developing space-based LiDAR for lunar applications. Moonraker would downlink LiDAR data directly to Earth, where it’d be processed into three-dimensional Digital Elevation Models, intended to support landing site identification, hazard assessment, and surface planning for future robotic and human missions. -0- A compact four-wheeled rover prototype developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is expanding the boundaries of robotic autonomy and terrain mobility, with implications for future missions to the Moon and Mars. The prototype, known as ERNEST, short for Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain, recently completed a seven-day field campaign in the Colorado Desert of Southern California, covering 16 miles over 37 hours with minimal human intervention. That’s an order of magnitude faster than NASA’s current Mars rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, can navigate. The ERNEST team is now launching a new autonomy project to integrate active suspension capabilities with longer-range intelligent navigation, enabling the rover to plan efficient paths around or through obstacles. A federal audit released Monday warns that NASA’s two primary launch sites are running out of capacity to support a dramatic surge in commercial and government launches, with aging infrastructure, some dating to the Apollo era, at risk of causing mission delays unless Congress removes funding barriers and the agency accelerates long-deferred repairs. The NASA Office of Inspector General report “NASA’s Launch Infrastructure”, found that Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia are both projected to approach or reach operational capacity by 2028 to 2029. Launches supported by Kennedy grew from 31 in 2020 to 109 in 2025, a 252 percent increase, and are projected to reach 268 per year by 2030. Wallops saw an even steeper climb, from 3 launches in 2020 to 17 in 2025, a 467 percent jump, with projections reaching 44 launches annually by 2030. This week on The Journal of Space Commerce Podcast, I talked with Dr. Tom Colvin, Managing Partner and Chief Technologist at Rational Futures, to unpack the findings of the firm’s recent report “SCRUBBED: America’s Launch Capacity Challenge,” commissioned by the Commercial Space Federation. Colvin acknowledged that traditional launch sites like Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg are already straining under congestion, infrastructure coordination failures, and regulatory friction. “Right now, operators are experiencing friction at the current launch cadence. The predictions for future launches are kind of off the charts, and nobody knows really what the capacity of even our existing infrastructure is, or when we’ll hit that capacity limit, what’s the biggest bang for the buck to fix it,” Colvin said. “And so we were taking a first sort of stab at making a much more rigorous, physically grounded and traceable analysis that people who are trying to plan for future infrastructure can use. Because if you’re going to build new infrastructure, you want it to be right-sized to the amount of demand or services that you’re going to have to provide. So that was effectively what we were doing, we pitched that we can also bring in certain technical constraints that we haven’t seen other people address.” Non-traditional sites, inland and sea-based spaceports, hold theoretical promise, but face massive capital requirements and a demand problem that market forces alone aren’t likely to solve. Proposals for orbital data center constellations totaling over one million satellites represent a demand scenario so large it’d require an entirely different conception of what American launch infrastructure looks like. -0- NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has moved quickly to collapse the agency’s mission directorate structure from seven directorates down to three, the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, a reconstituted Science Mission Directorate, and the Space Operations Mission Directorate. [Paywall] The Space Technology and Aeronautics Research directorates are being wound down, with programs distributed across the three survivors or terminated. As of this week, NASA hasn’t published a complete roster showing which programs land where. That gap is the operational risk. Every active contract carries a funding authority and a contracting officer. When that chain changes, modifications take time, and where contracting officers of record change, the FAR Part 42 novation process can add weeks or months of administrative lag. The restructuring is running simultaneously with a proposed fiscal year 2027 budget that recommends cutting the Science Mission Directorate by approximately 50 percent relative to fiscal year 2025 enacted levels. Congress hasn’t acted on that proposal. But supplier behavior, including workforce planning, hiring decisions and subcontract renewals, is already adjusting to a budget that hasn’t been passed. -0- Every U.S. government satellite in production depends on radiation-hardened semiconductors fabricated at one of a small number of domestically qualified foundries, and right now, three major program families are drawing from that same pool at the same time. [Paywall] The Defense Microelectronics Activity Trusted Foundry Program lists fewer than five domestic qualified fabs. Among them: Microchip Technology, BAE Systems Electronic Systems, Honeywell Aerospace, and SkyWater Technology. These foundries operate on process nodes from roughly 90 to 350 nanometers, and moving a chip program to a different foundry means requalifying from scratch, at timelines that typically run 18 to 36 months. The concurrent demand: the Space Development Agency’s proliferated low Earth orbit constellation has Tranche 2 production underway with Tranche 3 solicitation activity already on SAM.gov. The GPS III Follow-On with Lockheed Martin is a sustained multi-year draw through the late 2020s. And NRO next-generation procurement is active in the same window, additive to the capacity calculation, and invisible to the other two program offices. No public disclosure mechanism requires a prime contractor to reveal a foundry booking conflict before it becomes a delivery slip. The government has acknowledged the gap, SkyWater received a DoD CHIPS for America award. But new process qualification runs three to five years. That investment doesn’t rescue a 2026 or 2027 delivery schedule. -0- Voyager Technologies acquired Astrobotic Technology in early 2025, and with it, the most active lander portfolio in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. It also came with a heritage record that consists of one flight attempt that didn’t reach lunar orbit. [Paywall] Peregrine Mission 1 launched in January 2024, and suffered a propellant leak within hours of separation. The spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere ten days later. NASA hasn’t released a final root-cause determination. Voyager-Astrobotic now owns that propulsion architecture, the avionics and guidance stack, the payload integration interface specifications, and the ground operations infrastructure for both the Peregrine and Griffin landers. Griffin is the more consequential issue. NASA canceled the VIPER mission, Griffin’s primary payload, in July 2024, before the acquisition closed. Griffin is currently a large-class lander without a confirmed payload customer. Any organization that has designed a payload to Astrobotic’s interface specifications and needs to re-manifest to an alternative platform is looking at 18 to 24 months of re-qualification work, minimum. Two alternatives with active flight records exist: Firefly Aerospace, whose Blue Ghost Mission 1 landed successfully in March 2025, and Intuitive Machines, publicly traded as LUNR, with the Nova-C lander’s IM-1 Odysseus flight in February 2024. The pool isn’t empty, but it’s thinner than the vendor count suggests once you account for interface re-qualification. -0- You Might have Missed * South Australia Range Signs U.S. Firm for Multiple Orbital Reentry

    15 min

  2. Jun 21

    Orbital Data Centers, Golden Dome OTAs and a European Space Act Update

    The United States has begun enrolling foreign governments into its Traffic Coordination System for Space, marking the first expansion of the system beyond commercial satellite operators. The Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce has opened what it calls National Government Account access. OSC hopes to build a global space situational awareness coordination framework under Space Policy Directive 3, which directed Commerce to provide space traffic safety data and services to operators worldwide. The United Kingdom and Australia are the first two governments to onboard. The accounts are read-only, giving each country access to space safety information for all spacecraft affiliated with their nation. The program has no announced timeline for additional government enrollments. -0- A new industry-academia collaboration aimed at improving scientific understanding of what happens to Earth’s atmosphere when satellites burn up on reentry has launched, with Astroscale Holdings as convener and Planet Labs and the University of Southampton as founding participants. The initiative is called Atmospheric Impact of Reentered Spacecraft, or AIRS. Astroscale will coordinate the effort and contribute its own spacecraft data. Planet brings expertise in Earth observation, satellite manufacturing, and operations. The University of Southampton contributes research capabilities in aerospace engineering and atmospheric science. During reentry, spacecraft are exposed to extreme heating and interaction with atmospheric gases, leading to melting, fragmentation, and vaporization of materials. Under the program, space operators and manufacturers will share non-proprietary spacecraft design information with academic researchers. The goal is to improve atmospheric modeling accuracy, while protecting commercially sensitive data. -0- Starfish Space has selected Gilmour Space Technologies as the docking partner for its Otter Pup 2 on-orbit demonstration mission, targeting a docking attempt in the coming months. Otter Pup 2 launched in June 2025 to demonstrate rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking technologies in low Earth orbit. Following a series of successful rendezvous tests, Starfish Space chose the Gold Coast, Australia-based company for the next phase of the program. The mission will have Otter Pup 2 perform rendezvous and proximity operations with a Gilmour Space ElaraSat M-M-S-1 satellite ahead of the planned docking attempt. The collaboration gives the Gilmour Space operations teams flight heritage on proximity and docking procedures. -0- Axiom Space and Prada have unveiled the inner cooling and ventilation layer of the next-generation lunar spacesuit for NASA astronauts. The garment, called the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment, or L-C-V-G, is engineered as the innermost layer of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, known as the AxEMU. It is designed to keep astronauts thermally regulated and breathing during spacewalks of up to eight hours on the lunar surface. Axiom Space holds the NASA contract to develop the AxEMU for the Artemis program. The suit is slated for use on Artemis IV, which would mark the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17. The next articles are previews to some of the content that is available to paid subscribers to The Journal of Space commerce. Become a paid subscriber to get the full story. The first Starship-class orbital data center platform has a name, a delivery date, and a power architecture. The sub-tier supply chain it requires doesn’t yet exist at that scale. (Paywall) Muon Space recently unveiled Condor-Ultra ... a Starship-class spacecraft designed for data-center-class compute, with a 20-kilowatt initial power architecture scaling to 100 kilowatts in future variants. It integrates the NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Module, a purpose-built A-I inference platform Muon Space says delivers up to 25 times the compute performance of an H-100 GPU for orbital workloads. The first pathfinder delivery is targeted for 2028. Three supply problems define the near-term window, starting with power generation: Spectrolab and SolAero supply the majority of radiation-tolerant triple-junction solar cells sold in the United States. Golden Dome constellation programs are competing for the same production lines, and a capacity crunch could push program schedules back 12 to 18 months. Then, there’s thermal management: at 100 kilowatts of waste heat, passive radiators can’t do the job, that’s a vacuum physics constraint. No supplier currently offers a complete integrated active thermal control system at that power level. Meanwhile, NVIDIA hasn’t publicly disclosed the Vera Rubin Module’s radiation tolerance specification. Any program committing to a 2028 delivery will need to make a processor sourcing decision within the next 12 months or fall back to currently qualified hardware with significant performance limitations. The F-A-A’s June 2026 test flight approval for SpaceX’s Starfall in-orbit manufacturing vehicle is the regulatory triggering event. It establishes that a large-format Starship-class payload with computing functions can move through regulatory review, a precedent that didn’t exist twelve months ago. -0- Space Systems Command has awarded 12 “Other Transaction Authority” agreements worth a combined $3.2 billion for space-based interceptor prototype development under Golden Dome. Reading the vendor list as a capability map tells supply chain managers where the gaps are. (Paywall) The 12 companies span four tiers. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, General Dynamics, and Booz Allen Hamilton are the traditional primes, the systems integrators the program needs for hardware manufacturing at scale. RTX has confirmed it’s working with Rocket Lab as a subcontractor, the first visible sub-tier teaming relationship to surface publicly. Anduril’s inclusion signals that Space Systems Command views autonomous intercept decision architecture, not just interceptor hardware, as a core prototype requirement. Sci-Tec and Quindar are the tier that procurement officers shouldn’t overlook. Both are specialists in satellite ground systems operations and orbital analytics. Their selection signals that command, control, and ground segment capability will be evaluated at the prototype stage, it won’t be deferred to a later program of record. SpaceX, True Anomaly, GITAI USA, and Turion Space form the fourth tier, and the most structurally significant one. True Anomaly focuses on autonomous orbital operations. GITAI develops robotic systems for in-space assembly. Turion focuses on orbital mobility. Together, they describe an interceptor design space the established defense industrial base can’t supply without commercial partnerships, and a supply chain that doesn’t yet exist at production scale. One more number matters here. In late May 2026, Space Force awarded a separate $4.16 billion contract for a satellite constellation to track and target airborne threats globally. Together, the interceptor and tracking layer awards describe a complete kill chain being built simultaneously through the OTA mechanism. When two separate vendor sets are developing tightly coupled layers under separate agreements, the interface control documents that bridge them become the critical path item no single vendor owns, and the highest-priority near-term entry point for data link and software-defined radio vendors. -0- Surface treatment vendors, the facilities that apply coatings, anodizing, and corrosion-resistant finishes to flight hardware, are one of the least visible and most concentrated risks in the current space hardware supply chain. The bottleneck isn’t the technology. It’s the certification regime. (Paywall) Three overlapping qualification frameworks govern the work simultaneously: military process specifications, NASA process approvals, and NADCAP third-party accreditation. Maintaining all three isn’t optional, a lapse in any one can trigger a re-qualification process lasting months and effectively sideline a vendor for new program work. The vendor landscape that results is thin. In electroless nickel plating, program managers sourcing a replacement vendor mid-program routinely find the qualified list narrows to one or two names when all requirements apply simultaneously. Re-qualification typically takes 90 to 180 days. In chemical conversion coatings, which is the highest-volume category for aluminum structures, the subset of vendors holding both commercial satellite and DoD classification-sensitive approvals is materially smaller than it appears. Two forces are compressing that capacity further right now. EPA regulatory pressure on hexavalent (Hex-uh-VAY-lent) chromium has pushed some qualified vendors out of the market entirely, they won’t invest in chemistry reformulation and re-qualification at the volumes they handle. And the current Golden Dome and commercial constellation production surge is driving demand that post-processing facilities can’t quickly scale to meet. Unlike fabricated components, post-processing capacity is constrained by facility square footage, chemical bath volume, and environmental permits. It can’t be doubled on short notice. Programs that map their post-processing dependencies now, before production orders arrive, can still negotiate long-term capacity agreements with qualified vendors. Programs that wait won’t have that option. -0- Finally ... the European Council circulated a compromise text of the EU Space Act in May, advancing it toward trilogue negotiations with the European Parliament. Every U.S. space company seeking European revenue will need to make a compliance decision before this regulation enters into force. (Paywall) The Council’s text narrowed the jurisdictional scope from the Commission’s original proposal, tightening the trigger to operators that launch from EU territory, operate satellites under a member sta

    17 min

  3. Jun 14

    SpaceX Changes the Commercial Launch Equation, and Beyond the LTV Contracts

    Four astronauts have been assigned to Artemis III, a two-week Earth orbit test mission scheduled for 2027 that will demonstrate rendezvous and docking operations with commercial lunar landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX. The crew will include NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik as commander, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano as pilot, and NASA astronauts Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas as mission specialists. NASA astronaut Bob Hines was named backup commander and will train alongside the prime crew. The announcement came during a live event Tuesday at Johnson Space Center, identifying the mission as a critical step toward Artemis IV the first planned crewed landing at the lunar South Pole, targeted for 2028. The Artemis III crew will launch aboard NASA’s Space Launch System rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman gave an overview of the mission. Isaacman VSOT (See Transcript) The crew will begin training immediately on Orion systems and will assist in development and operations of both the SpaceX and Blue Origin lander test articles. -0- York Space Systems has closed its approximately $67 million cash and stock acquisition of Solestial ... a Tempe, Arizona-based manufacturer of silicon solar cells engineered for the space environment. The transaction closed June 4th. York paid using a negotiated share value of $34.00 per unit, issuing more than 1.7 million shares of its common stock to Solestial’s sellers. The deal targets a supply chain vulnerability York says runs through the core of the satellite manufacturing industry. China controls 99% of the gallium and more than 60% of the germanium required for the legacy III-V solar cells used in most spacecraft today. It also produces 93% of the world’s polysilicon used in terrestrial solar panels. Approximately 95% of Solestial’s supply chain is already U.S.-based. Solestial will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of York and will continue supplying solar technology to external customers outside York’s own portfolio. -0- The Federal Communications Commission’s Space Bureau has opened two new processing rounds. The rounds cover non-geostationary orbit satellite systems seeking authority to operate in Ku-, Ka-, and V-band frequencies with a July 6th, 2026 deadline for new applicants. The bureau released the public notice June 5th. Three operators already hold conditional authorizations folded into these proceedings: SpaceX, Amazon Leo, and Logos Space Services. A fourth operator, SN Space Systems, has an application pending from the second V-band processing round that also requested Ku- and Ka-band authorization. The FCC has not set a deadline for acting on applications filed in the third processing rounds. -0- And are SPACs making a comeback? A merger agreement announced Monday values Rockville, Maryland-based spacecraft developer Quantum Space at $1.2 billion post-transaction. The company is set to go public through a combination with special purpose acquisition company Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. The merged entity will operate under the Quantum Space name and is expected to list on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “QSPC” pending shareholder approval and an anticipated close in the fourth quarter of 2026. Quantum Space has raised $57 million in equity funding to date, including a $40 million Series A extension closed in June of last year. The company’s Ranger 500 spacecraft completed a Manufacturing Readiness Review in late 2025. -0- SpaceX flew Starship Version 3 for the first time last week, and the launch cost equation for commercial payload customers shifted with it. [Paywall] The test flight, designated Flight 12, launched from a newly constructed second launch pad at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southern Texas. It deployed 20 Starlink simulator satellites on a suborbital trajectory over approximately 10 minutes. SpaceX said ahead of the flight it did not anticipate a flawless test. Post-flight, the company confirmed the V3 ship stage completed its planned suborbital trajectory but the Super Heavy booster did not return to the launch site as planned. The architecture behind V3 is a structural redesign. The booster now uses three larger grid fins, an integrated hot-staging design, and a new interstage configuration SpaceX calls its Block 3. The company states V3 is designed to carry approximately 200 metric tons to low Earth orbit in fully reusable configuration and roughly 400 metric tons in expendable configuration. To put that in context: SpaceX’s original Starship required an expendable vehicle to reach 200 metric tons. The V3 reusable rating matches that number. That means a customer flying on a reused V3 vehicle accesses the same mass budget that early Starship variants could only achieve by expending the vehicle. Third-party analytics group Payload Research estimated Starship’s internal cost per kilogram in an expendable V1 configuration at approximately $500. Under V3’s advertised capacity, that same analytical framework suggests the per-kilogram number could fall by roughly half. Those are third-party projections. SpaceX has not published a V3 commercial rate card. The commercial payload certification timeline for V3 has not been announced. Neither has the timeline for non-Starlink, non-Starshield cargo access to the vehicle. -0- Impulse Space closed a $500 million Series D on June 2nd, bringing its total capital raised to more than $1 billion and the supply chain behind that ambition is still being built. [Paywall] The round was co-led by 137 Ventures and BANNER VC, with participation from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Linse Capital. The funds are earmarked for vehicles, propulsion systems, and operational architecture, a broad mandate that signals Impulse is actively expanding its manufacturing and supply base. Impulse operates two distinct vehicle programs. Mira, the company’s last-mile maneuvering spacecraft for low Earth orbit, has flown multiple operational missions, delivering satellites from rideshare drop points to their final orbital destinations. Its propulsion, avionics, and structural sub-tiers are either qualified or actively in qualification, indicating a supply chain in execution mode. Helios is a different story. The Helios kick stage is designed for geosynchronous orbit rideshare and deep-space transfer requiring substantially higher-thrust chemical propulsion, larger propellant tanks, and thermal management hardware that Mira does not need. As of June 2026, Helios has not flown. Its sub-tier qualification chain remains open. That opening is the primary supply chain opportunity this raise signals. The Series D’s explicit call-out of propulsion systems as a fund deployment target confirms that Helios’s propulsion architecture is still being finalized and sourced. For suppliers of high-thrust bipropellant engines, composite overwrapped pressure vessels known as COPVs and GEO-class thermal management systems, this is a defined qualification window. Suppliers with existing COPV credentials, including Arde, a Moog subsidiary with flight-heritage high-pressure vessels, and Steelhead Composites, a Colorado-based manufacturer with LEO constellation heritage, represent the vendor class for which that window is most directly relevant. There’s also a defense layer. Impulse is working as a subcontractor to Anduril Industries on the Space Force’s space-based interceptor prototype for Golden Dome, a team that also includes K2 Space, Inversion Space, Voyager Technologies, and Sandia National Labs. That relationship adds defense-grade guidance, navigation, and control requirements to Impulse’s avionics stack. Radiation-hardened flight computers are now part of the qualification picture. And those parts face supply pressure across the entire defense space sector. Suppliers currently qualified on SpaceX, Rocket Lab, or Millennium Space Systems programs hold a meaningful head start. For others, early engagement with Impulse’s supply chain team should be considered a prerequisite. NASA awarded two Lunar Terrain Vehicle contracts on May 26th. The headline is which companies won. The story for supply chain leaders is the procurement architecture behind the awards. [Paywall] Venturi Astrolab received a contract to produce its FLEX rover. Lunar Outpost received a contract for its MAPP rover. Both awards fall under NASA’s Artemis campaign. Combined, they represent approximately $440 million in potential contract value. Neither award is a single-delivery purchase order. Both were structured as indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts meaning NASA retains the right to issue task orders across a defined ordering period, with total contract value contingent on task order activity rather than fixed at award. That IDIQ structure signals NASA is building a recurring acquisition framework for sustained lunar surface capability, not issuing a one-time purchase. The rover contracts are one procurement layer in a five-domain architecture. NASA currently has active procurement activity or announced intent across surface mobility, surface power, surface communications, in-situ resource utilization, and surface habitat. Of those five domains, only surface mobility has named prime awards fully in place as of June 2026. The Fission Surface Power program co-developed with the Department of Energy is the most time-urgent open window. Phase 1 design contracts went to Battelle Energy Alliance, IX, a joint venture between X-energy and Intuitive Machines, and Lockheed Martin in June 2023. Phase 2 awards for flight hardware have not been announced. The sub-tier qualification window for flight-rated fission power components, shielding materials, and heat rejection systems is open now. There is also a timing issue for the LTV program specifically. Venturi Astrolab and Lunar Outpost have each disclosed technical partnerships and supply relationships in filings dating 18 to 24 months before th

    19 min

  4. Jun 7

    The Challenges of Keeping Up With the Demand for Direct to Device Components. And Can the Supply Chain Be Weaponized?

    In what appears to be a major change in direction, a NASA spokesperson said the agency will be pulling back from the CLD Core Module approach to developing a replacement for the International Space Station. Details are still thin, but NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens posted recently on X that the agency was going to re-think the strategy. “In the spirit of learning from past programmatic challenges and ensuring a responsible transition from the International Space Station, NASA evaluated both the current commercial space station approach and alternative pathways,” the post on X said. “Industry has provided extensive feedback making the case for a sustainable commercial market in which NASA is one customer among many, along with assurances regarding available transportation capabilities. The industry position will now shape the path forward as NASA proceeds with the original commercial strategy. “Over the coming weeks, NASA will work with stakeholders and industry to refine flexible requirements and acquisition plans, with a draft RFP expected later this month.” While NASA has informally reversed its proposed overhaul of the CLD program, the change has not yet been reflected in acquisition actions, with the Phase 2 contract still on hold and no RFP issued. This is a developing story, and we will bring you more details as they become available. It also fundamentally changes information we published in several articles this week that were researched prior to the shift. We apologize for the error. -0- Voyager Technologies has signed an agreement to acquire Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology for up to approximately $300 million in a combination of cash and stock, including contingent consideration. The deal joins a defense technology and space solutions company with a commercial lunar delivery operation that Astrobotic has built over nearly two decades. Astrobotic operates from facilities in Pittsburgh and Mojave, California, and holds contracts under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The combined portfolio spans mission management, communications, propulsion, surface delivery via the Peregrine and Griffin landers, surface power through LunaGrid, and habitation through Max Space. The transaction requires customary regulatory approvals and is expected to close by early July 2026. -0- NASA has awarded contracts to two companies to build and deliver crewed lunar rovers to the Moon’s south pole by 2028. Venturi Astrolab received a $219 million task order, and Lunar Outpost received $220 million — both under Phase 1 High Achievability Mission task orders of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract. Astrolab’s entry, the Crewed Lunar Vehicle-1, is adapted from the company’s FLEX rover architecture. Lunar Outpost delivers the Pegasus rover, a lighter evolution of its Eagle platform built specifically to meet NASA’s updated requirements. Both rovers reach the lunar surface through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. -0- Apogee has been awarded a five-year, $103.6 million task order to provide positioning, navigation, and timing — or PNT — contractor support services for the Department of War. The contract targets modernization of Global Positioning System capabilities essential to U.S. military operations, allied forces, and critical infrastructure worldwide. Under the agreement, Apogee will support modernization, acquisition, and sustainment planning for GPS-based technologies. The award comes as the Department of War refines its GPS acquisition strategy with an emphasis on delivering capabilities more rapidly to operational users. The F-C-C made two significant moves in last month, and together they set a procurement clock that supply chain leaders may not yet recognize is running. [Paywall] The first was FCC Order 26-26, released May 1st. The order eliminated mandatory Equivalent Power Flux Density limits — constraints that had governed non-geostationary orbit satellite operators since the late 1990s. In their place, the FCC established voluntary coordination agreements between N-G-S-O and geostationary operators. The Commission estimated the shift delivers up to seven times more usable spectrum capacity and more than $2 billion in economic benefits — without a single additional launch. Twelve days later, the FCC approved SpaceX’s acquisition of approximately 65 megahertz of mid-band spectrum from EchoStar Corporation — AWS-4, AWS H-Block, and unpaired AWS-3 licenses — in a $17 billion transaction. That spectrum underpins SpaceX’s next-generation Direct-to-Device network. Final consummation is expected by November 30, 2027, with interim buildout milestones spanning nine years. The FCC also granted AST SpaceMobile commercial authorization in April 2026 to deploy 248 satellites providing Supplemental Coverage from Space — SCS — using low-band 700 and 800 MHz spectrum in coordination with Verizon, A-T-&-T, and FirstNet. Half that constellation — 124 satellites — must be in orbit by August 2030. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have since announced a joint venture to build a technology-neutral satellite D2D platform targeting unserved and underserved areas. Those carriers are not simply customers. They are setting the technical interface standards every hardware supplier will need to meet. The supply chain pressure point is certification. D2D services at commercial scale require chipsets, modems, and radio frequency front-end components that do not yet exist in sufficient commercial volume. The FCC issued a one-year waiver allowing a broader range of end-user devices to connect to SCS services while equipment certification requirements are finalized. That waiver has a hard clock. Procurement programs that wait for an extension rather than plan to the stated deadline are carrying schedule exposure they do not need. -0- The United States Space Force’s Future Operating Environment 2040 report places supply chain disruption inside its darkest operational scenario — not as a footnote, but as a named gray-zone instrument alongside jamming, spoofing, and cyber intrusion. [Paywall] The FOE’s “Dark Horizons” scenario describes a 2040 environment of continuous, hard-to-attribute conflict below the level of declared war. Within that environment, the document explicitly identifies “targeted micro-supply chain disruptions framed as product recalls” as a tool China could use to gradually weaken adversary capability while staying below the threshold of open conflict. The core of the tactic is the disguise: a supply disruption that arrives as a quality issue, a safety notice, or a routine recall — and routes through commercial processes rather than military channels. The FOE cites Russia’s Sfera (sf-ER-ah) constellation as a concrete reference point. That program was cut from 600 to 360 satellites due to component shortages — demonstrating that even a major spacefaring nation can be bottlenecked by fragility in key inputs. The document identifies three supply chain categories with elevated exposure: radiation-hardened microelectronics, rare-earth magnets, and ammonium perchlorate. Program managers and executives at commercial space companies and defense primes relying on single-source suppliers in any of those categories now have the Space Force’s own risk framework to reference when making the case internally for supply chain diversification. -0- A recent Blue Origin New Glenn launch anomaly and ongoing Starship booster incidents have put a spotlight on something the space industry has been slow to treat as a core competency: crisis communications. [Paywall] Within minutes of each event, video clips flooded social media. Analysts speculated. Investors watched. Competitors observed. And customers began asking questions behind closed doors. That is the reality of today’s space economy. A launch anomaly is no longer simply an engineering event. It’s a communications event with potential impacts on a company’s reputation and brand. Michael Daily, President of NewSpace Brand Builders and Ex Terra Media contributor, argues that most space supply chain firms still treat crisis communications as a contingency plan sitting in a binder — and that approach belongs to a previous era. In today’s commercial space environment, Daily contends that crisis communications is brand strategy. Launch providers, propulsion firms, avionics manufacturers, software developers, component suppliers, and systems integrators all operate inside a tightly connected ecosystem. When a high-profile failure occurs, the ripple effects move rapidly across the entire network. Daily’s core argument: organizations that have inte grated crisis preparation into their broader brand strategy project leadership during turbulence, while those that haven’t project uncertainty. Silence becomes noticeable. Contradictory messaging damages confidence. The companies that handle crises best rarely improvise — they prepare, build communications protocols, train executives, and align legal, engineering, operations, and communications teams before the first emergency ever occurs. For supply chain companies, that preparation shifts from optional overhead to operational resilience. It is competitive positioning. And in the modern space industry, it’s trust preservation. -0- Amazon’s $11.57 billion acquisition of Globalstar, announced in April 2026, marks a structural turning point for the commercial space industry — and the implications run well beyond two companies striking a deal. [Paywall] Amazon is not a space investor. It’s a logistics, retail, and cloud infrastructure company that has concluded satellite connectivity is too strategically important to source from a competitor. The buyer acquired Globalstar’s licensed spectrum bands and global network infrastructure. Based on the stated strategic rationale and deal structure, spectrum scarcity — not operating

    16 min

  5. May 31

    NASA Shuffles the Directorate Deck, and the Realities of Orbital Refueling

    NASA is reshaping its leadership structure in what Administrator Jared Isaacman is calling a realignment to accelerate mission delivery. Under the reorganization announced last week, the agency is consolidating its five mission directorates into three. The ‘Exploration Systems Development’ mission directorate and the ‘Space Operations’ mission directorate are merging into a new ‘Human Spaceflight’ mission directorate. On the technology side, the ‘Aeronautics Research’ and ‘Space Technology’ directorates will combine into a new ‘Research and Technology’ mission directorate, which will also take on nuclear power and propulsion development. The ‘Science Mission Directorate’ remains unchanged. One of the more significant structural shifts: all directorate leaders will now report directly to the Administrator, rather than through layers of management. Isaacman says the goal is to cut bureaucratic drag and focus the agency’s talent on its top priorities, returning humans to the Moon, building a sustainable lunar base, and expanding the commercial economy in low Earth orbit. The reorganization also brings new leadership to three field centers, Goddard, Glenn, and Kennedy, and sets up a competition for the contract to manage the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when Caltech’s current agreement expires in 2028. For the commercial space industry, the realignment signals where NASA is directing its institutional weight. A leaner, more mission-focused NASA, with directorates reporting directly to the top, could mean faster decisions on commercial partnerships, procurement actions, and program commitments. That matters for anyone in the supply chain waiting on a government signal to move. -0- Blue Origin is making one of the largest single manufacturing investments in Florida’s space history. The Jeff Bezos-founded rocket company announced a 600-million-dollar expansion of its Rocket Park campus at Cape Canaveral, a project the company is calling Project Horizon. The centerpiece is an 830-thousand-square-foot upper stage manufacturing facility designed to increase the volume and mass Blue Origin can deliver to orbit from Florida. The project is expected to generate 500 aerospace jobs, with average salaries topping 98-thousand dollars a year. For the Space Coast, this is more than a construction announcement. Upper stage manufacturing is a high-precision, high-skill segment of the launch supply chain, the kind of facility that anchors a regional industrial base and draws sub-tier suppliers into the area. Blue Origin’s investment is a long-term signal that it intends to compete aggressively in the launch market from Florida. And the ripple effects on local suppliers, workforce pipelines, and adjacent infrastructure could be substantial. -0- Meanwhile, about 1,000 miles to the west, Firefly Aerospace is executing a different kind of manufacturing buildout, one focused on turning spacecraft production from a one-at-a-time process into a repeatable assembly line. The Cedar Park, Texas company has moved into a new headquarters campus, adding two new buildings to its existing spacecraft facility. Put together, the new buildings give Firefly roughly 144-thousand square feet of unified space — double what it had before. That campus sits less than 30 miles from the Rocket Ranch in Briggs, Texas, a 200-acre complex with six test stands dedicated to launch vehicle development. The centerpiece of the expansion is a new cleanroom ... four times larger than Firefly’s existing one and funded by a Texas Space Commission grant ... designed to support dedicated assembly lines for Blue Ghost lunar landers and Elytra orbital vehicles. Running multiple vehicles through integration concurrently is a direct answer to the production bottlenecks that have slowed spacecraft manufacturers trying to scale. Firefly has also established an in-house innovation lab called Gloworks, bringing propulsion, carbon composites, robotics, and 3-D printing capabilities under one roof. The idea is to compress lead times and keep critical intellectual property inside the company rather than farming it out to external suppliers. The company says the Cedar Park investments allow Firefly to template its Blue Ghost lunar lander into a production line capable of supporting multiple lunar missions per year. For a commercial space industrial base that is still largely built around one-off fabrication, that kind of throughput ambition is worth watching closely. -0- A new report released at the 2026 ASCEND Conference is putting hard numbers on a concern that has been building quietly in the launch industry: the United States may not have enough capacity to handle what’s coming. The report is titled “SCRUBBED: America’s Launch Capacity Challenge”. It was produced by Rational Futures in partnership with the Commercial Space Federation using FCC regulatory filings, government budget data, and orbital mechanics modeling to map three demand scenarios against existing U.S. launch infrastructure. The numbers are significant. With more than 180 launches conducted from U.S. soil in 2025, the report finds that demand could require up to 7,000 launches per year depending on which satellite constellations move to full operation. Annual spacecraft demand could range from 6,000 to as many as 230,000 satellites. The report identifies two categories of concern. At traditional launch sites like Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, the primary obstacle isn’t physical space, it’s coordination. The report calls for a central management authority to handle zoning, shared infrastructure scheduling, and a reduction of evacuation zones through improved analysis of methane explosive yield. For newer and non-traditional inland spaceports, the challenge is economics. Standing up a site capable of supporting 10 to 20 orbital launches per year costs roughly 200-million dollars, a figure that market activity alone is unlikely to recover. The report identifies federal tools that could bridge the gap, including anchor tenancy arrangements and direct capital funding. The findings are landing at a policy-active moment. The Trump Administration is currently revising the National Space Transportation Policy, and the report’s authors are explicit: waiting for market forces to solve this problem on their own is not a viable approach. Every time a rocket lifts off, the camera follows the name on the side of the vehicle. The prime contractor gets the headline, the press release, and the investor call. The hundreds of suppliers who built the guidance system, the valves, the thermal protection, the power electronics, they get nothing but a purchase order. [Paywall] That gap between visibility and contribution has a name. Michael Daily, president of NewSpace Brand Builders and Ex Terra Media contributor, calls it the Integration Illusion, and he argues it isn’t just a communications problem. It’s a strategic market power problem with consequences that run through the entire space industrial base. Here’s how it works. System primes capture nearly all market visibility, investor attention, political prestige, and public brand authority. The component suppliers who enable mission success remain commercially anonymous, even when their technology is the actual source of mission differentiation. A propulsion supplier may solve an historic efficiency problem. A sensor company may create breakthrough imaging capability. A materials firm may engineer survivability essential for deep space. But the market only remembers the name painted on the spacecraft exterior. Daily identifies four downstream effects that should concern anyone tracking the health of the space industrial base. First, invisibility weakens supplier pricing power. When buyers treat subsystem providers as interchangeable, procurement gets driven by cost pressure alone. That compresses margins across the supply chain and discourages long-term innovation investment. Second, it damages capital formation. Investors gravitate toward companies with visible market narratives. Suppliers without strategic brand presence often struggle to communicate their relevance beyond technical specs, and their innovations end up hidden inside someone else’s story. Third, invisible suppliers lose the talent competition. The next generation of engineers increasingly wants to work for companies associated with purpose and recognition. Technical excellence isn’t enough if nobody knows you exist. Fourth, and this is the one that should keep program managers up at night, invisibility increases systemic industrial fragility. If critical suppliers can’t sustain profitability, attract investment, or recruit expertise, the broader ecosystem becomes structurally vulnerable. Large primes may appear stable while the niche suppliers beneath them are quietly undercapitalized and at risk. Daily’s prescription isn’t louder marketing. It’s repositioning. Suppliers need to stop describing themselves through technical specifications and start communicating strategic consequence. Not “we manufacture radiation-hardened electronics.” But rather: mission survivability and national space resilience depend on our capability. That’s the kind of narrative that changes a procurement conversation. -0- The regulatory door for commercial on-orbit refueling has officially opened, and the suppliers who were already positioning themselves are pulling ahead. [Paywall] On March 24th of this year, the Office of Space Commerce released its proposal for a voluntary Space Commerce Certification process. The framework creates a consolidated interagency review pathway for commercial activities that fall outside existing regulatory regimes, explicitly including satellite servicing, on-orbit refueling, proximity operations, and orbital computing. The certification process is opt-in, not mandatory. But it provides something more valuable than a mandate: a pr

    20 min

  6. May 24

    NASA GAO Questions the Moon Lander Program, and AIAA Publishes Satellite Operator Best Practices

    NASA’s own watchdog is raising serious concerns about the agency’s commercial lunar lander programs, and the findings touch everything from cost controls to crew safety. The agency’s Office of Inspector General has issued audits covering both the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, known as C-L-P-S, and the Human Landing Systems program, or H-L-S, which is developing crewed landers for the Artemis campaign. On the C-L-P-S side, auditors found that costs had risen by more than 208 million dollars across the portfolio, with average schedule delays reaching at least 14 months per task order. NASA’s original delivery timelines were based on overly optimistic assumptions about the commercial market, assumptions that failed to account for supply chain constraints and technical development challenges. The average time from contract award to launch was running 44 months, compared to the 30-month target NASA originally set. The firm-fixed-price contracting model NASA uses, which puts financial risk squarely on vendors, created enough pressure that one C-L-P-S contractor went bankrupt. Others continue to operate under financial strain. The Human Landing Systems program tells a more nuanced story. Auditors found that contracting costs had been largely controlled, the SpaceX H-L-S contract increased by just six percent, and the Blue Origin contract by less than one percent. But technical and integration hurdles remain, and the crew safety picture is incomplete. Specifically, auditors found gaps in NASA’s testing posture and said crew survival analyses were not finished. And there is a live disagreement between NASA and SpaceX over whether the company is meeting the requirement for manual astronaut control during lunar descent, a potentially critical safety issue if something goes wrong during final approach. NASA has confirmed that Artemis Three will include critical on-orbit tests, rendezvous and docking with one or both landers, as a precursor to Artemis Four, which would return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years. -0- The aerospace industry has raised the bar for satellite operations, releasing what may be the most comprehensive orbital safety document yet published, and the timing is deliberate. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics published Version 3-point-0 of its Orbital Safety Best Practices for Satellite Operators this week. The document carries signatures from Amazon, Eutelsat, Iridium Communications, and SpaceX, a cross-section of the industry that reflects both the document’s reach and its ambition. The release coincides with ASCEND 2026, the A-I-A-A’s flagship conference running through this week in Washington, where orbital traffic management and space sustainability are front-and-center topics. The document covers the full lifecycle of a satellite, from design through disposal, and is written for global applicability. It is not a government regulation. It is a voluntary framework, and the authors are explicit about why: technology evolves faster than rulemaking, and guidelines built around goals are more durable than rigid rules that can’t keep pace. Some of the specific standards are worth noting. Satellites must be designed with reliable maneuvering capability and a radar cross-section large enough for tracking authorities to catalog them. Operators are expected to achieve a greater-than-90-percent probability of completing planned disposal. On orbit, operators are required to submit predicted position and velocity data to conjunction assessment authorities at least three times daily for low Earth orbit satellites. The standard threshold for a required collision avoidance maneuver remains one-in-ten-thousand, but when a potential collision could produce more than 50 debris fragments, the recommended threshold tightens to one-in-one-hundred-thousand. The disposal rule is direct: L-E-O satellites that cannot naturally decay within five years must be actively deorbited. And the document takes a firm position on pre-launch transparency, requiring operators to publicly share planned orbits, launch cadences, and satellite counts before launch. The governing principle is this: if something is discoverable after launch, it should be shared before. -0- A Jacksonville, FL company just closed a major funding round to build what it’s calling the first power grid in space. Star Catcher Industries has raised 65 million dollars in a Series A round — bringing total capital raised to 88 million dollars. The company uses optical power beaming to deliver electricity on demand to satellites in orbit, with no retrofit or custom hardware required on the receiving spacecraft. The first-ever space-based demonstration of that technology is scheduled to launch later this year. I spoke with Star Catcher co-founder and C-E-O Andrew Rush about what this raise means for the program and what comes next. (See Interview Transcript) Andrew Rush is co-founder and C-E-O of Star Catcher Industries. Joining the board as part of the Series A round is General John “Jay” Raymond, the first Chief of Space Operations of the United States Space Force. The satellite broadband race has a real second competitor now, and the stakes are significant. (Paywall) Amazon Leo, the low Earth orbit broadband service formerly known as Project Kuiper, is moving toward a mid-2026 commercial launch. Amazon rebranded the initiative last November, retiring the Project Kuiper name in favor of Amazon Leo. The company currently has more than 240 satellites in space and is working toward a constellation of more than 3-thousand, authorized by the F-C-C and planned across five deployment phases. The performance targets are competitive. Amazon Leo’s enterprise-grade terminal is designed to deliver up to one gigabit per second on downloads. Its standard residential terminal targets up to 400 megabits per second. Latency is expected in the 30-to-50 millisecond range, comparable to what Starlink delivers today. But scale is the key variable. Starlink currently operates roughly nine-thousand active satellites and has years of operational head start. Amazon Leo is just entering the market. Where Amazon may have its most meaningful edge is not in raw satellite count, it’s in ecosystem. Amazon Leo is being built with deep integration into Amazon Web Services, making it a natural connectivity layer for enterprises already running A-W-S cloud workloads. That positioning moves this competition out of a simple speed-and-price fight and into the enterprise infrastructure market, which is a very different battleground. Amazon C-E-O Andy Jassy recently described the service as “on the verge of launching,” noting the company has already secured revenue commitments from enterprises and governments. The broader commercial rollout is expected throughout the rest of 2026. -0- The in-space mobility sector keeps attracting serious capital, and the latest raise carries signals that go well beyond the headline number. (Paywall) Portal Space Systems, based in Bothell, Washington, closed a 50-million-dollar Series A in April, valuing the company at 250 million dollars. The round was led by Geodesic Capital and Mach33, with participation from Booz Allen Ventures, ARK Invest, AlleyCorp, and FUSE. It follows a 17-and-a-half-million-dollar seed round, one of the largest publicly disclosed seed financings in the sector at the time. The company was founded in 2021 by Jeff Thornburg, a former SpaceX engineer who helped develop the Merlin engine program. Its core technology is solar thermal propulsion, a system that concentrates sunlight directly to heat ammonia-based propellant, generating specific impulse approaching nuclear thermal performance levels, without a reactor and without the regulatory burden that comes with one. Portal’s Supernova spacecraft is designed to deliver up to 6 kilometers per second of delta-v across orbital regimes from low Earth orbit all the way to cislunar space. Orbital maneuvers that currently take weeks using conventional propulsion can be executed in hours or days. The investor mix tells the real story here. Booz Allen Ventures does not back science projects. Its director Travis Bales stated directly that the investment was made to, and this is a quote, “advance orbital warfare through the development of rapidly maneuverable spacecraft, something we know our customers need.” That is not investor relations language. That is a requirements statement delivered in a press release. Portal also carries a 45-million-dollar Strategic Funding Increase award, known as a S-T-R-A-T-F-I, from the U.S. Space Force’s SpaceWERX program. That award preceded the Series A close. When the Space Force backstops a commercial round before private capital comes in, that sequencing is a procurement signal, not a coincidence. The near-term proof point is Starburst-1, a smaller demonstration vehicle manifested on a SpaceX rideshare mission in the fourth quarter of 2026, designed to demonstrate rendezvous, proximity operations, and rapid orbital retasking. Eighty-one percent of Starburst and Supernova components are shared, a deliberate design decision that builds flight heritage for the full solar thermal system while generating near-term program revenue. The supply chain risk is real and worth noting. Portal’s production depends on additive manufacturing vendors capable of working with advanced thermal materials to tolerances that legacy aerospace manufacturing does not routinely hold. That sub-tier supplier base is small and not yet publicly mapped. The company has a C-E-O-stated target of four spacecraft per month by end of 2027, a production rate that has not been verified against confirmed facility capacity or supplier commitments. That is where the program risk concentrates, and it is the detail that procurement and program management professionals should be tracking. -0- The commercial s

    24 min

  7. May 17

    The FCC Rewrites the Rulebook on Direct-to-Device, and the Satellite Industry’s Annual Report

    On May first, the Commission released a landmark Report and Order replacing decades-old energy caps with a performance-based spectrum sharing framework. The ruling is designed to sharpen competition between satellite, cable, and terrestrial wireless providers. And then, on May twelfth, the F-C-C issued a separate approval for SpaceX to acquire approximately 65 megahertz of mid-band spectrum from EchoStar Corporation -- in a 17-billion-dollar transaction. That spectrum -- covering AWS-4, AWS H-Block, and unpaired AWS-3 licenses -- is the foundational layer SpaceX needs for its next-generation Direct-to-Device network. Commercial D-2-D services could begin as early as late 2026 for initial messaging and emergency alerts, with full constellation buildout extending through the next several years. Layer on top of that what the F-C-C had already done in April for AST SpaceMobile. The Commission granted AST commercial authorization to deploy a constellation of 248 satellites providing supplemental coverage from space -- using low-band 700 and 800 megahertz spectrum in coordination with Verizon, AT&T, and FirstNet. Half the constellation -- 124 satellites -- must be in orbit by August of 2030. And then this week, the story got even bigger. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon announced plans for a joint venture to expand satellite-based direct-to-device connectivity across the United States -- specifically targeting unserved and underserved areas. The joint venture would pool spectrum, create common technical standards, and build what the carriers are calling a technology-neutral platform that any qualified satellite operator can plug into. The three carriers aren’t just customers here. They are becoming the infrastructure layer that determines which satellite operators succeed at commercial scale. For investors and supply chain managers watching the D-2-D market -- the regulatory and commercial framework just got a lot more real. -0- NASA has proposed a CLPS 2-point-0 procurement -- a competitive follow-on to its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program -- and the agency intends to launch monthly uncrewed missions to the Moon beginning next year. To support that cadence, NASA moved to raise the CLPS contract ceiling to 4-point-2 billion dollars. (Paywall) The most recent award went to Intuitive Machines -- a 180-point-4-million-dollar contract to deliver seven science and technology payloads to the Lunar South Pole region. That’s Intuitive Machines’ fifth CLPS task order. For context -- this is the company that successfully landed the first commercial spacecraft on the Moon in 2024. On the private side, Lunar Outpost just closed a 30-million-dollar Series B -- oversubscribed -- led by Industrious Ventures. The company now has eight fully contracted lunar and cislunar missions on its manifest before 2030, more than any other commercial surface-mobility provider. Revenue has doubled each year for four consecutive years. The White House is leaning in as well. The Trump administration’s commercial-first architecture is explicitly targeting lunar surface presence by 2028, framing satellite connectivity and lunar logistics as critical national infrastructure. The question worth tracking is not whether the lunar market is real. It is. The question is whether the supply chain serving it can scale fast enough. Component lead times, launch cadence, and ground infrastructure are the binding constraints -- and those are exactly the kinds of gaps that create near-term opportunities for suppliers who move early. -0- The GEO-to-LEO transition has stopped being a debate. It is now an operating reality -- and the numbers from early 2026 earnings make that clear. (Paywall) Eutelsat Group’s early-2026 results showed LEO revenues surging nearly 60 percent year-over-year, while GEO revenues declined 4-point-5 percent. For the first time, the growth curve of the new business visibly outpaced the decline of the old one. Eutelsat followed that with a contract with Airbus valued at between $2.34 and $2.57 billion dollars for 340 additional LEO satellites -- backed by a $1.75 billion capital increase supported by the French and British governments. Those governments aren’t just writing checks. They’re treating satellite connectivity as critical national infrastructure, and they want sovereign capacity that Starlink cannot provide. Telesat Canada tells a different version of the same story -- and a more turbulent one. The company faces a 1-point-7-billion-dollar debt maturity wall in December 2026, and creditor litigation alleging it moved its LEO constellation assets beyond the reach of GEO-linked lenders. Telesat has dismissed the suits. Its prime contractor MDA Space is completing a high-volume manufacturing facility in Quebec aimed at a full launch cadence of 156 Lightspeed satellites by end of 2027. SES and Intelsat merged for 3-point-1 billion dollars, creating a combined fleet of 120 satellites and projecting free cash flow above $1.17 billion annually by 2027 and 2028. The merged entity’s highest-growth segments now account for roughly 60 percent of combined revenue -- including medium-Earth-orbit capacity serving NATO and defense clients. The through-line: the concept of multi-orbit has moved from conference keynote buzzword to core operating model. Companies that couldn’t afford to make this transition aren’t around to talk about it anymore. The ones still standing -- Eutelsat, SES-Intelsat, Viasat -- are building hybrid architectures that neither orbit can serve alone. The hard part isn’t the boardroom decision. It’s the engineering: creating a system that will enable seamless handovers between disparate orbits for a passenger mid-flight or a naval vessel mid-maneuver. None of the major operators have demonstrated that at commercial scale. That is the milestone the industry’s credibility depends on. -0- SpaceX has confidentially filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and is targeting a late June initial public offering. The numbers being discussed are unlike anything the public markets have ever processed. (Paywall) The most recent reporting puts the target valuation between 1-point-5 and 1-point-75 trillion dollars, with a fundraising goal between 50 and 75 billion dollars. Either figure would shatter the record set by Saudi Aramco’s 29-billion-dollar offering in 2019. At 1-point-75 trillion, SpaceX would enter the public market in the same bracket as Alphabet and Amazon. Prediction markets as of this week placed the probability of a June 30th listing at around 72 percent. SpaceX is essentially three businesses operating in parallel: Starlink, which generates the bulk of current revenue growth; the launch business, which has no close competitor on cost or cadence; and a nascent space infrastructure and A-I platform play that Elon Musk has described as Space A-I Data Centers. For space commerce investors and analysts -- the I-P-O matters beyond the price. A public SpaceX will file quarterly reports. For the first time, the market will have standardized financial visibility into the company that now controls a dominant share of global launch capacity, the world’s largest satellite constellation, and the regulatory approvals shaping the entire direct-to-device market. The information environment around space commerce changes materially the day that S-1 becomes public. -0- A new analysis published this week by the Journal of Space Commerce maps a supply chain constraint that most constellation programs haven’t fully priced in: space-grade solar cells. (Paywall) Novaspace’s latest market report projects 16-thousand-900 small satellites launching between 2026 and 2035 -- roughly 1,400 pounds of hardware delivered to orbit every single day. But that headline number actually understates the pressure on the solar cell supply chain. In April, Space Systems Command awarded 20 Other Transaction Authority contracts worth up to 3-point-2 billion dollars to 12 companies prototyping orbital Space-Based Interceptors for the Golden Dome missile defense architecture -- including Anduril, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX, and Raytheon. Each of those prototype satellites carries power requirements that must be met by space-qualified solar cells from the same supplier base already serving the commercial constellation market. None of that demand appears in the commercial procurement pipelines. The qualified supplier base for space-grade gallium arsenide solar cells comes down to two dominant players: Spectrolab -- a Boeing subsidiary in California -- and AZUR SPACE Solar Power, based in Germany. AZUR has been expanding aggressively -- up 35 percent in 2024, 30 percent in 2025, another 25 percent expansion announced in February for second-half 2026. Over three years, that’s roughly a 118 percent capacity increase. The problem is the baseline those percentages are measured against. It was already considered a bottleneck before the 2026 demand acceleration. And the binding constraint in that particular solar cell supply chain isn’t cell assembly -- it’s germanium wafers, the semiconductor substrate on which every triple-junction cell is built. The global germanium wafer market for space solar applications had a total value of approximately 125 million dollars in 2024. That is a small market to underpin 16-thousand-900 satellites, a proliferated interceptor constellation, and multiple sovereign programs. That germanium market is dominated by two players: Umicore, a Belgian materials company -- and China Germanium, a state-linked Chinese enterprise. China accounts for roughly 60 percent of global refined germanium output. In a scenario where export controls tighten or U-S-China trade tensions escalate further, a germanium supply disruption would propagate through the entire Ga-As cell production base. The downstream signal is already visible. Satellite integrators and mission designers have reported sign

    22 min

  8. May 10

    Satellite Spectrum Rules Get a Major Update From the FCC. And the Earth Observation and Satellite Propulsion Markets

    The Federal Communications Commission has updated the rules governing how geostationary and non-geostationary satellite systems share spectrum. The Commission voted 3-0 on April 30 to approve a Report and Order that replaces a framework dating back to the late 1990s. That old framework was known as Equivalent Power Flux Density, or EPFD. The problem is that the satellite market no longer looks like it did in the 1990s. Modern broadband constellations can change signal behavior in real time, based on link conditions. The FCC’s new approach moves toward performance-based protection criteria, rather than fixed limits built for an earlier technical era. The Commission says the change could unlock as much as seven times more capacity for space-based broadband and generate more than 2 billion dollars in economic benefits. But the regulatory point is only half the story. The commercial point is that the FCC is clearing more operating room for satellite broadband to compete directly with cable, wireless and other terrestrial providers. FCC Chairman Branden Carr said at the April 30th meeting that the new rules will benefit consumers. “Today’s FCC decision will help supercharge that competition while expanding our country’s technological leadership,” Carr said. “Even though high-speed next-gen satellite services provide essential connectivity across the country already, Americans are now about to see a big upgrade. With today’s decision, Consumers could see a seven-fold increase in capacity for these high-speed satellite offerings.” The decision keeps pressure on private agreements and good-faith spectrum sharing. But it moves the center of gravity away from old technical caps and toward actual performance outcomes. For executives, investors and program managers, that is the signal to watch. Spectrum policy is now a direct driver of capacity, pricing and market entry. -0- Two new market reports this week tell the same broad story from different ends of the satellite business. One looks downstream, at satellite-based Earth observation. The other looks upstream, at propulsion. Together, they show where demand is growing and where the supply chain may come under stress. First, Earth observation. According to Allied Market Research, the global satellite-based Earth observation market is projected to grow from $3.5 billion in 2022 to $6.4 billion by 2032. That is a compound annual growth rate of 6.6 percent. The demand drivers are familiar, but stronger: agriculture, urban planning, disaster management, climate monitoring and defense. Government procurement is still doing a lot of the heavy lifting, with NASA, NOAA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency all buying more commercial data and analytics. The market is also shifting from raw imagery toward services. Observation-as-a-service, subscription imagery, on-demand tasking and AI-assisted analytics are becoming the more valuable layers. That is the downstream signal. The upstream signal is propulsion. A MarketsandMarkets analysis projects the global satellite propulsion market will grow from a tweak over $2 billion in 2026 to $4.66 billion by 2031. That is a 17.6 percent compound annual growth rate. The reason is simple. Satellites are not passive hardware once they reach orbit. They need propulsion for orbit raising, station keeping, collision avoidance, repositioning and controlled deorbiting. Electric propulsion is expected to be one of the strongest growth areas because it lowers propellant mass and fits constellation economics. But there is a caution inside the growth number. Market size does not equal supplier depth. A market can grow quickly and still be constrained by manufacturing capacity, qualification timelines and a limited base of flight-proven providers. That is why these two reports should be read together. Earth observation growth means more demand for analytics and more government reliance on commercial data. Propulsion growth means more demand for the hardware that keeps satellites maneuverable. All of that points to value moving toward companies that can connect data, hardware, operations and procurement into something customers can use. -0- Next, we turn from market reports to the organizations that help hold the industry together. Space Foundation was established in 1983, and for more than 40 years it has played the role of convener across the global space community. It does not build rockets. It does not operate constellations. Its job is to build the ecosystem around the companies, agencies, investors and international partners that do. That role is easy to understate until the industry gets complicated. Right now, the industry is dealing with Artemis, Golden Dome, national security space, commercial stations, proliferated constellations and harder questions about international partnerships. Rich Cooper, vice president of Strategic Communications and Outreach at Space Foundation, made that point in a conversation on The Journal of Space Commerce podcast. “I will say the state of relationships between international partners, who can do what, who is prepared to do what. Obviously, there’s a lot of challenge that’s going on in the world and lots of debate and discussion about what those alliances are and what they may look like in the future,” Cooper said. “But what you also, I would say, saw is relationships that have been built over decades. literally decades of collaboration and cooperation on countless numbers of missions. Those relationships remain as strong today as they were before. And that’s what gives, I would say, a great deal of energy to this community that we know we can do hard things. We know it’s going to take some challenge. We know that there are going to be some obstacles, but we know together we can get there. Artemis II proved that when you have all of the various pieces that came together and it all worked perfectly.” The point being that Space commerce is not just a collection of contracts. It is also a relationship network. It depends on which agencies trust which suppliers, and which international partners can still coordinate when politics get hard. The launch vehicles, the spacecraft and the payloads are visible. The trust network is more behind the scenes. But when programs become multinational and span multiple decades, the trust network becomes a very important part of the operating infrastructure. A piece of the American launch stack is changing hands again. AE Industrial Partners is taking a majority stake in Rocketdyne’s upper-stage propulsion assets from L3Harris Technologies in an 845 million dollar carve-out. AE Industrial Partners will acquire 60 percent. L3Harris will retain roughly 40 percent. (Paywall) AE Industrial Partners Managing Partner Kirk Konert told Ex Terra Media just after the acquisition was announced that the company was proud to be restoring a legacy name to the rocket propulsion market. “It’s been part of every lunar mission since the US started going to the moon and bringing humans to the moon and coming back to the moon this year. We’re really excited to be part of part of that in partnership with NASA and national security programs. And it’s I think it’s a really interesting model as we think about what’s happened with consolidation of all their aerospace and space companies over the last a few decades,” Konert said. “And now what we’re seeing is more of a deconsolidation and new entrants being being introduced into the market. This is part of part of that theme in a new way, which where L3 a prime has been part of the consolidation over the last couple of decades is now partnering with a specialized investor like AE industrial to reinvigorate and standalone a new platform in Rocketdyne, which includes some of the key workhorses of propulsion for our space and national security programs in the U.S.” The assets include the RL10 upper-stage engine, in-space propulsion systems, nuclear power assets for exploration missions and launch avionics. The RS-25 engine business is not part of the deal. The RL10 is the center of this story. It powers the Centaur V upper stage on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. That vehicle is tied to National Security Space Launch missions, including payloads for the National Reconnaissance Office, GPS Block III and Wideband Global SATCOM. That means this is not just another aerospace carve-out. It touches national security launch and the long-term industrial base behind upper-stage propulsion. AE Industrial Partners has said it wants to apply modern manufacturing discipline to the RL10 production line. That could mean additive manufacturing, better throughput and relief for a constrained supplier base. But the ownership question matters. Private equity operates on return horizons. National security launch programs operate on long-term infrastructure commitments. Those timelines can coexist, but they are not the same. And engine substitution is not easy. Upper-stage engines are tightly integrated into vehicle architectures. Qualifying an alternative engine for Centaur V could take two to three years of testing and integration work. If RL10 production improves, the deal could strengthen a critical piece of launch infrastructure. If ownership incentives or exit timing create disruption, customers do not have a simple procurement detour. For program offices, investors and primes, the question is whether the owner can steward an engine line that national security customers still depend on. -0- Previously, we talked about a satellite propulsion market forecast showing growth from just over $2 billion in 2026 to $4.66 billion by 2031. Those numbers sound healthy. But a separate supply-chain analysis asks a harder question: who is actually going to build all the thrusters the market assumes will be available? (Paywall) The answer may be thinner than the growth charts suggest. Novaspace has forecast

    19 min
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A weekly newsletter published to the community highlighting the news of the week and letting you know who our podcast guest is that week. We will look ahead to the coming week to see what's happening and let you know. www.exterrajsc.com

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  • Creator
    Ex Terra Media, LLC
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    81
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Ex Terra Media, LLC
  • Show Website
    Space Commerce Week