Episode Details

Main Topics

Rockets

* Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded in historic fashion during a static fire test at Launchpad 36 in Cape Canaveral on Thursday, May 27th. [source]

* Gilmour Space announced an additional $14.2M in further capital investment, debating the pros and cons of breaking that and other investment out from their current oversubscribed Series E round into a separate Series F round. [source]

* Voyager Space announced the award of a $16.5M DARPA contract to make post-manufacturing thrust controls for solid rockets. [source]

* Zurich based startup Stellar Alpina raised $4.5M for on-orbit Rotating Detonation Rocket Engines. [source]

Ground

* NASA announced the Management Contract for JPL would be made open to competition after 68 years of exclusivity with CalTech. [source]

* A Canadian consortium led by Nordspace, including Miltera Machining, Pegmatis, and Prime Powders was awarded $3.2M for an AI-enabled factory of the future focused on Space Propulsion. [source]

* Schaeffler AG announced a partnership with Spire Global for sovereign satellite production at scale, leveraging Spire’s Space expertise and Schaeffler’s manufacturing expertise at scale to achieve a space production capacity to serve the growing ecosystem by the end of the decade. [source]

* Observable Space raised a $90M Series A for optical laser ground stations and simultaneously won a $94M USSF contract for in-space optical laser terminals. [source]

SpaceX

* SpaceX won a $2.29B for the Space Data Network to connect military assets across the globe with low-latency, high quality communications. [source]

* SpaceX awarded $4.16B to deploy the Space-Based Moving Target Indicator to track aircraft, vehicles, and vessels from space. [source]

* SpaceX’s Starfall project - a massive logistics and transportation play with satellites capable of carrying a full ton of payload - completed FAA environmental screening [source]

* Exolaunch and SEOPS acquired multiple dedicated falcon 9 launches to repl