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.
Intuitive Machines has landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, in a historic first for a private company.
“What we can confirm without a doubt is that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting,” mission director and Intuitive Machines CTO Tim Crain said.
Instead, the lander leveraged one of the onboard payloads, NASA’s laser and doppler lidar sensors, to guide the spacecraft to the lunar surface.
All in all, Intuitive Machines’ contract is worth a little less than $118 million.
Intuitive Machines’ victory comes shortly after another CLPS awardee, Astrobotic, failed to put its lander on the moon.
Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander is still operating on orbit, with the company saying there is “growing optimism” that the spacecraft could survive in space longer than the current estimate.
The Pittsburgh-based startup has been releasing a series of updates to social media platform X since the spacecraft’s launch in the early hours of Monday morning.
Shortly after separating from the launch vehicle, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur, engineers immediately started encountering issues.
But despite all odds, Peregrine has been operational in space for more than four days, and the estimated operational time remaining continues to extend.
The remaining 10 payloads on board are passive, and do not require power or communications from the spacecraft.
