Tag: Spaceflight Inc.

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Spaceflight Industries seeks $150M from investors

An artist’s conception shows Black Sky’s imaging satellites in orbit. (Black Sky Illustration)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries is seeking as much as $150 million in new investment as it gets ready for a key rocket launch and a dramatic expansion of its satellite presence.

The outlines of the offering are described in documents filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing reports that $40,656,523 worth of securities have been sold, with $110 mlllion remaining to sell. The first sale was recorded on Oct. 19, according to the filing.

This offering isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill funding round. The filing says the total amount includes a $60 million convertible debt facility and $50 million in capital stock, the sale of which is subject to regulatory approval.

The $40 million sold so far includes more than $15 million in capital stock issued pursuant to the conversion of convertible notes, according to the Form D documents.

Spaceflight Industries told GeekWire that it couldn’t disclose any additional information at this time, “due to the nature of the deal and the parties involved.”

The company’s backers include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management, RRE Venture Capital and Razor’s Edge Ventures. Last year, Spaceflight Industries conducted a $25 million Series B financing round.

This September, it struck up a partnership with the Space Alliance, a venture involving Europe’s Thales Alenia Space and Telespazio. As part of the deal, Thales Alenia and Telespazio pledged to make a minority investment in Spaceflight Industries, and it’s likely that the offering reported today pertains at least in part to that pledge.

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Spaceflight wins $5.5M NASA service contract

Spaceflight’s SHERPA carrier is capable of deploying scores of satellites. (Spaceflight Illustration)

Seattle-based Spaceflight says it’s been awarded its first contract for launch and integration services from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The three-year deal is potentially worth $5.48 million.

The NASA contract calls for Spaceflight, a business unit of Spaceflight Industries, to provide launch services for up to 24 payloads in 2018 with options for up to 24 more payloads in 2019 and in 2020.

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Spaceflight teams up on satellite campaign

An artist’s conception shows BlackSky’s satellites in low Earth orbit. (Spaceflight Industries Illustration)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries has forged a partnership with a French-Italian venture known as the Space Alliance, formed by Thales Alenia Space and Telespazio, to accelerate plans for a 60-satellite constellation of Earth-observing satellites.

The partnership involves a minority investment in Spaceflight Industries, the creation of an industrial joint venture between Thales Alenia and Spaceflight in the United States to produce satellites, and an agreement between Telespazio and Spaceflight’s BlackSky business line for marketing satellite data.

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BlackSky wins $16.4M Air Force contract

BlackSky’s online imaging platform can link a satellite view of the Syrian city of Aleppo to real-time social media streams about the area to provide greater context. (Spaceflight Industries Graphic)

BlackSky, a division of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries, has been awarded a two-year, $16.4 million cost-plus prime contract with the Air Force Research Laboratoryto deliver a cloud-based platform that can provide geospatial intelligence to government agencies.

The platform will provide on-demand analytics, collection and information services from global data sources, including satellite imagery, Spaceflight Industries said today in a news release.

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Spaceflight salutes India’s 31-satellite launch

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket wasn’t the only launch vehicle that took to the air today: India’s PSLV-C38 rocket sent an Earth-watching spacecraft called Cartosat-2E into a pole-to-pole orbit, along with 30 nanosatellites. Eight of those pint-sized satellites will be part of San Francisco-based Spire’s low-Earth-orbit constellation for tracking maritime traffic and monitoring the weather. Seattle-based Spaceflight played a role in getting Spire’s Lemur-2 satellites on the flight, and celebrated the successful liftoff from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center.

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Spaceflight buys Rocket Lab Electron launch

Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket is prepared for flight. (Rocket Lab Photo)

Seattle-based Spaceflight says it’s struck a deal to buy the full capacity of a single Electron rocket launch from L.A.-based Rocket Lab, so it can send other ventures’ small satellites into orbit at cut-rate prices. The dedicated-rideshare mission follows the model that Spaceflight set with SpaceX for a Falcon 9 launch, now expected to go up next year.

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BlackSky Spectra serves up satellite imagery

An image from BlackSky Spectra displays visible-light imagery, synthetic aperture radar readings and infrared data over Panama City and the Miraflores Locks. The imagery comes from Airbus Pléiades, Airbus TerraSAR-X and USGS Landsat. (Spaceflight Industries Photo)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries lifted the curtain on another satellite imaging service today: BlackSky Spectra, a Web-based platform that knits together pictures in a wide range of wavelengths, from visible light and infrared to radar imagery.

The on-demand service lets users easily search through more than 25 million archival images – and order up fresh pictures – from a multispectral, multinational squadron of satellites.

“BlackSky is transforming how we look at the world by integrating the widest variety of sensors into a revolutionary, easy-to-use service,” Jason Andrews, CEO of Spaceflight Industries, said today in a news release. “Increasing our capacity to take images and expanding the data set enables organizations to understand our changing world like never before.”

The new satellites in the BlackSky network include Airbus’ Pléiades, SPOT6/7, KazEOSat-1 and TerraSAR-X. They join 21AT’s TripleSat, SIIS’s KOMPSAT2/3/3A/5 and UrtheCast’s Deimos-2 on BlackSky’s menu.

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Spaceflight rebooks satellites on SpaceX list

Spaceflight’s SHERPA carrier is designed to deploy scores of satellites. (Credit: Spaceflight)

For more than a year, Seattle-based Spaceflight has been waiting to launch an array of 89 miniaturized satellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and deploy them in orbit from its innovative SHERPA carrier.

Now the launch logistics company isn’t waiting any longer.

All 89 satellites have been rebooked due to schedule concerns, Spaceflight’s president, Curt Blake, reported today in a blog posting.

“We found each of our customers an alternative launch that was within the same time frame,” Blake wrote. “It took a huge effort, but within two weeks, the team hustled to have all customers who wanted to be rebooked confirmed on other launches!”

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India’s 104-satellite launch sets a record

India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, sending 104 satellites spaceward. (ISRO Photo)

A record-setting flock of 104 satellites was successfully deployed into orbit overnight after the launch of an Indian rocket. Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries played a part in getting nine of those satellites where they needed to go.

India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, or PSLV, lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota at 9:28 a.m. local time today (7:58 p.m. PT Feb. 14).

The mission’s main payload was the Indian Space Research Organization’s Cartosat 2D, a car-sized satellite designed for environmental mapping. Another 88 Dove nanosatellites, each about the size of a toaster oven, will become part of Planet’s Earth-observing constellation.

Eight more nanosatellites were launched for Spire Global, which is filling out a constellation to monitor weather as well as aviation and maritime traffic. This is the second Spire PSLV mission facilitated by Spaceflight Industries, which handles launch logistics.

Spaceflight also arranged to get Israel Aerospace Industries’ BGUSat nanosatellite on the flight. BGUSat is a research spacecraft built by students at Ben Gurion University to perform cloud imaging and measure atmospheric background radiation.

Six more research satellites rounded out the flock, which represented the highest number of satellites launched on a single rocket. ISRO said all 104 satellites were successfully deployed into pole-to-pole orbits within a half-hour after launch.

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Syria crisis tests BlackSky satellite data portal

BlackSky’s online imaging platform can link a satellite view of the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo to real-time social media streams about the area to provide greater context. (Spaceflight Industries Graphic)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries is giving early adopters a preview of its online BlackSky satellite imagery platform, which blends overhead views of sites around the world with social-media posts and other reports about what’s shown in the pictures.

One of the first subjects to be tackled is the humanitarian crisis in the Syrian city of Aleppo, where tens of thousands of civilians have been caught in devastating bombing attacks and house-to-house fighting. That’s apt, because the members of the early adopter program include the United Nations as well as the World Bank and RS Metrics, a company that uses satellite imagery to track global developments.

“Tracking critical global events as they happen is of interest to all of our early customers,” Jodi Sorenson, vice president of marketing and communications at Spaceflight Industries, told GeekWire in an emailed comment. “We chose to use Aleppo as an example to demonstrate the platform’s ability to provide insights on areas of particular international importance.”

The BlackSky platform offers access to imagery from more than 10 Earth-watching satellites, including Korea’s KOMPSAT spacecraft and UrtheCast’s Deimos-2. Customers can also use the platform to order up near-real-time images of specified sites.

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