Spaceflight Industries

Spaceflight Industries, Inc. is an American private aerospace company based out of Herndon, Virginia that specializes in organizing rideshare space launches of secondary payloads and geospatial intelligence services.[1]

This article is about the company. For the topic, see space industry and aerospace industry.
Spaceflight Industries
Private
IndustryAerospace
Founded2010 (2010)
FounderJason Andrews
Headquarters
Herndon, VA
,
U.S.
Websitespaceflightindustries.com

Spaceflight Industries has two primary business services: Spaceflight, their launch rideshare service, and BlackSky, their geospatial intelligence service.

History

Spaceflight Industries was founded in 2010 by Jason Andrews, with Curt Blake joining soon thereafter as SVP and General Counsel.[2] Prior to founding Spaceflight, Mr. Andrews worked at Kistler Aerospace and founded Andrews Space in 1999. Mr. Blake has previous experience at Microsoft, Starwave, SpaceDev, and GotVoice.[3] Spaceflight's mission is to fundamentally improve access to space by making launch more routine, more cost effective, and with standard flight interfaces.

Spaceflight

The traditional business model for accessing space is one satellite to one launch vehicle.[4] With the miniaturization of satellite hardware and improved communication capabilities, satellites have decreased in size and grown more powerful following Moore's Law. Spaceflight buys excess capacity from commercial launch vehicles, sells the capacity to a number of "rideshare" secondary payloads, and integrates all of the secondary satellites as one discrete unit to the launch vehicle, providing a significant price discount to reach orbit compared to buying an entire launch vehicle.[5][6]

Launch payload sizes vary from 1 kg up to 300 kg micro-satellites and use a variety of space launch vehicles, such as Antares, Dnepr, Soyuz, and Falcon 9, as well as from the International Space Station.[7]

Spaceflight is in the process of developing its SHERPA system, a space tug that uses a custom ring as its primary structure and includes a propulsion system and other spacecraft subsystems to operate as both a hosted payload platform and an in-space maneuvering stage to reposition small and secondary spacecraft. SHERPA enables more access to space for small spacecraft and hosted payloads, and would be able to transport rideshare payloads to the Moon and Mars.[8][9]

Past and future missions

Spaceflight launched its first satellites, manifested by NASA Ames Research Center and Planet Labs, on board the Antares A-ONE and Bion-M No.1 missions in April 2013, respectively on the Antares 110 and Soyuz-2.1a launch vehicles.[10] As of January 2017, Spaceflight had delivered 78 payloads over 12 launches, piggybacking on, Antares, Dnepr, PSLV and Soyuz-2 rockets, or on board Cygnus and Dragon spacecraft to the ISS.[11][12]

In October 2015, Spaceflight Industries booked a launch slot on a Falcon 9 to deliver the 500-kg lunar lander built by SpaceIL for the Google Lunar X-Prize towards the end of 2017,[13] but the partners failed to meet this target date. Beresheet launched 22 February 2019 on a rideshare with the telecom satellite Nusantara Satu.[14]

In November 2016, Part-Time Scientists signed a launch contract with Spaceflight Industries for the delivery of its lander as a secondary payload on a vehicle yet to be identified, but most likely a SpaceX Falcon 9.[15][16]

In December 2018, Spaceflight announced the success of its SSO-A: SmallSat Express mission, which is the largest single rideshare mission from a U.S.-based launch vehicle till date. With the help of SpaceX Falcon 9, 64 spacecraft to sun-synchronous low Earth orbit were launched on 3 December 2018 from Vandenberg Air Force Base.[17] At EoPortal.org is a comprehensive detail of payload adapter and a list of payloads on the Spaceflight SSO-A rideshare mission.[18]

In August 2019, Spaceflight announced that it had purchased the first commercial launch of the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle from NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) (the Commercial Arm of ISRO) scheduled for launch from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India later that year. Spaceflight had already sold-out the entire manifest for this secured SSLV-D2 launch with spacecraft from an undisclosed U.S.-based satellite constellation customer.[19]

BlackSky

BlackSky, Spaceflight Industries geospatial intelligence service offers is a bleeding-edge provider of real-time information from space via its constellation of satellites and geo-intelligence platform.[20] BlackSky builds and operates their own earth-imaging satellite constellation and geo-intelligence platform offering near real-time data analytics. Their first, Pathfinder-1, was launched on 26 September 2016 and the first pictures released publicly on 14 November 2016.[21] In late 2018, BlackSky successfully launched Global-1 and Global-2, two of the company's next generation global satellites, aboard the SSO-A mission. The company is aiming for a 60-satellite constellation, which will offer 1-meter resolution and rapid satellite revisit rates.[22] The satellite constellation is currently being built by LeoStella LLC, a joint venture between Spaceflight Industries and Thales Alenia Space.[23]

References
  1. "Spaceflight Industries About page".
  2. "Spaceflight Hires Curt Blake, Seasoned Entrepreneur And Executive, As Senior Vice President And General Counsel". 13 October 2011. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  3. "Company Experience". Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  4. "Nanosats are go!". The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2016-05-09.
  5. "Spaceflight Inc. to Fly Payloads on LauncherOne". 20 July 2012. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  6. "Spaceflight Inc. Tapped To Find Rides for STP Satellite". Space News, 30 April 2012.
  7. "Spaceflight Inc. and SpaceX Sign Secondary Payload Deal". SpaceRef. 11 June 2012. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  8. "Spaceflight Completes SHERPA Design Review, Announces Hosted Payload Opportunities". Parabolic Arc. 7 August 2013. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  9. Rosenberg, Zach. "Spaceflight Inc unveils the Sherpa in-space tug" FlightGlobal, 7 May 2012
  10. "Five Spacecraft Launched By Two Launch Vehicles From Two Continents" Space News, 23 April 2013.
  11. "Launch Services - Past Launches". Spaceflight Industries. Retrieved 2016-01-07.
  12. Krebs, Gunter. "BlackSky Global 1, 2, 3, 4 / BlackSky Pathfinder 1, 2". Gunter's Space Page. Archived from the original on December 23, 2016. Retrieved February 12, 2017.
  13. Wall, Mike (2015-10-07). "Private Moon Race Heats Up with 1st Verified Launch Deal". space.com. Retrieved 2016-01-07.
  14. Chang, Kenneth (21 February 2019). "After SpaceX Launch, Israeli Spacecraft Begins Journey to the Moon". Retrieved 22 February 2019.
  15. "Moon-Race Team Reserves Rocket to Land Rovers Near Apollo 17 Site". Space.com. Retrieved 2016-12-04.
  16. "German X Prize team announces launch contract - SpaceNews.com". SpaceNews.com. 2016-11-29. Retrieved 2016-12-04.
  17. "Spaceflight Launches 64 Small Satellites on SpaceX's Falcon 9". Retrieved 3 December 2018.
  18. "First Rideshare mission of Spaceflight Industries, comprehensive details of payload adapter and list of payloads on the Spaceflight SSO-A rideshare mission". Retrieved 3 December 2018.
  19. https://spaceflight.com/spaceflight-inc-purchases-and-fully-manifests-first-ever-commercial-sslv-mission-from-newspace-india-limited-nsil-the-commercial-arm-of-isro-india/
  20. "Introducing BlackSky Spectra".
  21. "Hello Beautiful! Our first pictures from Pathfinder-1".
  22. "BlackSky website".
  23. "Thales Alenia Space, Telespazio and Spaceflight Industries Finalize Alliance to Manufacture Smallsats at Scale and Deliver Innovative Geospatial Services" (Press release). Business Wire. 13 March 2018. Retrieved 13 March 2018.
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