True Anomaly‘s first mission didn’t go as planned by any stretch of the imagination, but the space and defense startup’s CEO, Even Rogers, said he doesn’t consider it a failure.
The aim of this first mission, Mission X, was to demonstrate these capabilities on orbit for the first time.
True Anomaly closed a $100 million Series B round last year to accelerate those plans.
By all accounts, the outcome of Mission X has not slowed the company down whatsoever: True Anomaly is planning on flying at least twice more in the next twelve months.
“The success story of Jackal Mission X is twofold,” Rogers said.
Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit.
The pair had an audacious goal to commercialize what until very recently was promising but ultimately small-scale research into the effects of microgravity on pharmaceutical crystals.
Indeed, Varda’s first mission, which returned to Earth in February after 10-months in orbit, does not mark the first time a drug has been crystallized in microgravity.
Astronauts have been conducting protein crystallization experiments in space for decades on the International Space Station and before that, the Space Shuttle.
The startup’s next manufacturing mission will launch later this year, and the team plans to land that spacecraft in Australia.
Bumble’s new CEO talks about her critical mission: to spice things up at the company Tis the season for turnaround CEOsSince Bumble’s blockbuster IPO at the height of the pandemic, investors’ ardor with the dating service has cooled.
Part of it ties to AI, which Bumble’s rivals are also leaning into more heavily.
But as we approach our 10-year anniversary, it’s a great moment to think about how we best serve our mission.
Historically, what we’ve seen is that a lot of men will come to Bumble who believe in women being empowered.
Bumble has always been great at community-based marketing: hosting events and finding ambassadors who really want to represent the brand.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space.
As a preliminary step, the company used that second pad to launch an uncrewed Dragon capsule to the International Space Station.
This is the fifth and final mission Rocket Lab has performed for NRO under a contract the company was awarded back in 2020.
This week in space historyOn March 30, 1982, the space shuttle Columbia touched down at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The shuttle was carrying astronauts Jack R. Lousma and C. Gordon Fullerton, who were returning home after a successful eight-day mission.
Few missions more acutely embody the maxim “space is hard” than Atomos Space’s first demonstration mission, which the company has managed to pull back from the brink of disaster — more than once.
That demonstration mission, dubbed Mission-1, launched to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 4.
Deployment was nominal, and Atomos received its first ping from the spacecraft seven minutes after deployment.
After pulling some strings, they were able to get on the phone with the chief systems engineer of satellite communications company Iridium.
Atomos’ spacecraft were moving too fast, and in direct opposition, such that they couldn’t perform the data “handshake” with those Iridium satellites to actually transmit information back down to Earth.
Intuitive Machines’ second moon mission is still on track to launch before the end of this year, after the company only had to make minor adjustments to the lunar lander design, executives said during an earnings call Thursday.
That same lander class, which the company calls Nova-C, will be returning to the moon later this year in that second mission.
The Intuitive Machines team identified just “a handful of adjustments” that will be implemented on the second lander, CEO Steve Altemus said during the earnings call.
Intuitive Machines ended the fourth quarter of 2023 with $30.6 million in revenue and a cash balance of just $4.5 million.
Beyond the second moon mission, 2024 will likely be a pivotal year for the company, which is awaiting the decision on NASA awards that could be extremely lucrative.
SpaceX has performed 13 crewed missions, and all of them launched from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
But the company has long intended to upgrade a second pad — SLC-40 at the neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station — to expand its crew launch capacity.
Teams test the new emergency chutes from the pad 40 crew tower in Florida pic.twitter.com/rWVj7zaHp0 — SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 19, 2024As a next step, SpaceX is going to launch the CRS-30 cargo resupply mission.
In a media teleconference in February, SpaceX’s VP of build and flight reliability, Bill Gerstenmaier, said the cargo flight is an incremental step to astronaut launches.
“We would like to do a cargo flight first if we can.
SpaceX is continuing to make progress on the development of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, with the third test flight Thursday accomplishing considerably more than the previous two tests.
The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southeastern Texas at 8:25 a.m. local time.
Although SpaceX has been developing Starship for years, this is only the third time the company has attempted an orbital mission.
The hot-staging technique was performed for the first time, ever, during the second Starship test flight last November.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk congratulated the team on X, saying, “Starship reached orbital velocity!”Starship reached orbital velocity!
Apex Space just moved one step closer to its goal of upending satellite bus manufacturing, with the startup announcing on Tuesday that its first vehicle is healthy on orbit.
The company launched its first satellite, the first of a class Apex is calling “Aries,” on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 rideshare mission on Monday.
“That will be incredibly valuable over the next many years while the satellite stays in orbit,” Cinnamon said.
Apex, whose backers include Andreessen Horowitz and Shield Capital, is building productized satellite buses to solve the satellite bus “bottleneck” facing the space industry.
In addition to Aries, an ESPA-class spacecraft bus that can support payloads up to 100 kilograms, the company is also developing two larger bus product lines, Nova and Comet.
The organization also secured more than $90 million from other donors to support its research efforts.
This is when disagreements started between Musk and other co-founders of Tesla, OpenAI wrote in the blog post, which includes five email exchanges between Musk and OpenAI executives.
“As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control.
Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself.
As Ilya told Elon: ‘As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open.
