Cosmic Log
Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space is bringing in more funding after announcing several agreements to use its Otter spacecraft for missions ranging from inspecting dead satellites to extending the life of an operational satellite.
Starfish reported that it has raised nearly $21 million of a larger investment round in a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Sept. 27. Investors are not identified.
Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space has won a three-year, $15 million contract from NASA for a mission aimed at doing up-close inspections of defunct satellites in orbit.
Such inspections, to be carried out using Starfish’s Otter spacecraft starting in 2027, could blaze a trail for even more ambitious missions involving the repair or removal of such satellites.
The mission is known as SSPICY, an acronym that stands for Small Spacecraft Propulsion and Inspection Capability. NASA awarded the Phase III Small Business Innovation Research contract after a study that provided Starfish and three other small businesses with funds to develop mission concepts. (The other three companies were Kayhan Space, Turion Space and Vast Space.)
Taking care of orbital debris is a key component of NASA’s Space Sustainability Strategy. Orbital debris mitigation and satellite servicing are also key parts of the business model for Starfish, a five-year-old startup that was founded by two veterans of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, Trevor Bennett and Austin Link.
“We are excited to expand our partnership with NASA, building on our shared commitment to advancing in-space manufacturing and assembly capabilities,” Bennett said today in a news release. “It’s an honor for Starfish to lead the first commercial debris inspection mission funded by NASA. We look forward to collaborating on this and future satellite servicing missions to enable a new paradigm for humanity in space.”
A newly published market analysis of Amazon’s Project Kuiper effort to create a global satellite broadband network estimates the cost of getting the project off the ground at $16.5 billion to $20 billion — which is significantly higher than the $10 billion figure cited by the company four years ago.
In its analysis, Florida-based Quilty Space projects that launch costs alone will amount to $10 billion or more. Most of those launches are to be done by United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, which has executed only one space launch to date; and by Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which is still in development. Other launches will be taken on by ULA’s Atlas V and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 (which are tried and true), plus Arianespace’s Ariane 6 (which had its debut liftoff in July).
Project Kuiper aims to put 3,232 satellites into low Earth orbit to support a high-speed internet network that could serve tens of millions of users around the world — and, not incidentally, provide infrastructure for Amazon Web Services and for other current or future offerings from Amazon. Under the terms of Amazon’s license from the Federal Communications Commission, half of those satellites must be launched by mid-2026.
Two prototype Kuiper satellites were successfully launched on an Atlas V last year, and Amazon says another Atlas V is to send the first operational satellites into orbit by the end of this year. The current schedule calls for broadband services to be offered to customers starting sometime next year.
Amazon is well behind SpaceX and its Starlink satellite broadband network, which has more than 6,000 satellites in orbit. Quilty’s financial analysis says Starlink “will exit 2024 with 3.9M subscribers, revenues of $6.6B, and positive free cash flows.” But Quilty suggests that there’s still room in the market for Project Kuiper.
Amazon plans to build a secondary support facility for its Project Kuiper satellite processing center at Kennedy Space Center in Florida — a $19.5 million expansion plan that brings total investment in the site to nearly $140 million.
The 42,000-square-foot building will be placed next to the existing 100,000-square-foot structure at the satellite processing facility, Amazon said today in a blog posting. It’s meant to provide additional space for processing and storing flight hardware ahead of launch, allowing for a regular cadence of missions to deploy Project Kuiper’s 3,232-satellite constellation.
Project Kuiper is Amazon’s multibillion-dollar effort to provide broadband internet service around the globe via satellites in low Earth orbit. It’s viewed as a competitor for SpaceX’s Starlink network, which already has more than 6,000 satellites in orbit and more than 3 million subscribers.
Wars in space are no longer just science fiction. In fact, Space War I has been raging for more than two years, with no quick end in sight.
This isn’t the kind of conflict that involves X-wing fighters or Space Marines. Instead, it’s a battle over how satellites are being used to collect imagery, identify military targets and facilitate communications in the war between Ukraine and Russia.
“As I looked at Ukraine in the early months, it was obvious to me: This is the first space war,” says David Ignatius, a journalist who lives a double life as a foreign-affairs columnist for The Washington Post and a spy-thriller novelist.
In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Ignatius delves into the potential national-security threats posed by satellite-based warfare — and how he wove those threats into the plot threads of a new novel titled “Phantom Orbit.” The tale lays out a scenario in which Space War I tips toward a potentially catastrophic Space War II.
KIRKLAND, Wash. — Amazon gave U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell and other VIPs a sneak peek at the company’s Project Kuiper satellite factory, where thousands of spacecraft are to be manufactured for a global broadband network.
Today’s event included remarks by local officials as well as a ribbon-cutting ceremony — but access to sensitive areas of the 172,000-square-foot facility was limited due to concerns about confidentiality and export control requirements.
The factory, which quietly began operations in April, serves as the manufacturing hub for Amazon’s satellite project. Work is also being done at Project Kuiper’s 219,000-square-foot headquarters in nearby Redmond.
Last year, Amazon successfully tested two Redmond-built prototype satellites in orbit. Now full-scale manufacturing is ramping up in Kirkland, with the first completed production satellites due to be shipped to Florida this summer.
Cantwell noted that the state’s aerospace sector is a $70 billion industry that supports 250,000 jobs, and said that the Project Kuiper factory will add to Washington’s technological prowess.
“We like to say we’re the Silicon Valley of space here in Puget Sound,” she said. “And Kirkland now is joining the fight, helping us deliver not just better service, but a skilled workforce and great attention to how the United States is going to be very competitive in space communication.”
Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space has signed a contract with Intelsat to provide on-orbit life extension services to a geostationary satellite beginning in 2026.
It’s the first commercial contract for Starfish’s Otter satellite servicing spacecraft, which is currently under development. The deal follows up on Starfish’s $37.5 million contract with the U.S. Space Force for a satellite docking demonstration.
“Starfish Space is delighted to be supporting Intelsat with services provided by Otter,” Starfish Space co-founder Trevor Bennett said today in a news release. “They are an incredible team at the forefront of the industry, and the Otter will help them deliver even more to their customers. We’re also excited that this will be the first of many Otters that will make on-orbit servicing a standard part of satellite operations.”
Jean-Luc Froeliger, Intelsat’s senior vice president of space systems, said the Otter contract serves as a “perfect example” of Intelsat’s commitment to innovation and new technologies. “We look forward to utilizing the services provided by their Otter satellite to maximize the value the world’s largest geostationary satellite fleet can deliver for our customers,” Froeliger said.
Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed, and Intelsat isn’t saying exactly which satellite will be serviced.
The plan calls for Otter to begin by docking with and maneuvering a retired Intelsat satellite in geostationary graveyard orbit. Then Otter would move on to dock with an operational Intelsat satellite. Otter would use its onboard propulsion system to keep that satellite in an operational orbit for additional years of life.
It turns out that you don’t need the Men in Black to spot unidentified anomalous phenomena, which are also known as UAPs, unidentified flying objects or UFOs. Researchers have shown how the task of detecting aerial objects in motion could be done by analyzing Earth imagery from commercial satellites.
They say they demonstrated the technique using one of the most notorious UAP incidents of recent times: last year’s flight of a Chinese spy balloon over the U.S., which ended in a shootdown by an Air Force jet above the Atlantic Ocean. They also analyzed imagery of a different spy balloon that passed over Colombia at about the same time.
“Our proposed method appears to be successful and allows the measurement of the apparent velocity of moving objects,” the researchers report.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite broadband network has been tapped to provide internet connectivity to customers in seven South American countries, under the terms of a newly announced deal with Vrio Corp., the parent company of DirecTV Latin America and Sky Brasil.
Vrio plans to use the Kuiper network to serve residential customers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay. The area takes in about 383 million people, including tens of millions of people who still aren’t connected to the internet, according to World Bank estimates.
In a news release, Vrio President Dario Werthein said the collaboration with Project Kuiper addresses his company’s concerns about “bridging the technology gap and even more so the digital divide for our future generations.”
Will intelligent AI agents take on the job of capsule communicator in future missions to the moon, Mars and other space destinations?
It could happen, says James Burk, the executive director of the Mars Society.
“One of our advisers did a really deep dive on how the Apollo astronauts interacted with each other and with the CapCom back on Earth, and he came to the insight that the Apollo 17 astronauts were using CapCom almost like an AI bot — because the CapCom knew everything,” Burk said during a panel discussion focusing on the intersection of artificial intelligence and space ventures.
“You can imagine having an AI edge device which could be like a rover following the crew around, walking around the moon or Mars,” he said. “It’s watching them and taking stock of how everyone’s doing.”
This week’s panel was a crossover session presented at Madrona Venture Labs by the Washington Technology Industry Association for Seattle AI Week, and by Space Northwest for Seattle Space Week. “When you think about the kinds of megatrends of our time, two of the big ones are space and AI,” said Mike Doyle, Space Northwest’s president and co-founder.
Putting AI into space adventures isn’t exactly a new idea: The best-known sci-fi example is HAL, the AI who goes psycho in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There’s also the no-nonsense computer voice in the Star Trek saga, or Marvin the Paranoid Android in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
But the real world isn’t science fiction. Yet.