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Shetland Islands, with Unst uppermost in the top right. Image acquired by Landsat 8 on 19th May 2022. Data courtesy of USGS/NASA.

This week we’re going to look at the implications of recent events at Spaceport Cornwall on the wider space sector, together with the latest financing news for the sector and the final demise of a satellite after almost 40 years in space.

 Spaceports & Small Satellite Launches

Last week we wrote about the attempt to launch satellites from Cornwall. While the outcome was a disappointment for everyone involved, the ripples of this event spread far and wide in the small space sector. For example, recently:

• It was announced that five Earth Observation (EO) satellites from Japan’s Axelspace will help Canada’s NorthStar Earth and Space collect data on orbits for their proposed Space Situational Awareness (SSA) constellation. When not required to collect EO data, the satellite’s cameras will be pointed away from the planet to collect the data. The SSA constellation is planned to consist of 24 satellites, and the first three were due to launch in the middle of the year by Virgin Orbit. Of course, because of Virgin Orbit’s launch failure in Cornwall, investigations on what went wrong will need to be completed, alongside further testing before future launches. This could delay the initial launch of the three SAA satellites.
• SaxaVord Spaceport, previously known as Shetland Space Centre, recently announced a partnership with the German company Rocket Factory Augsburg to launch the first vertical rocket from UK soil this year. Now, they are also aiming to be the first launch from UK soil. The SaxaVord Spaceport on the Shetland Island of Unst, the most northerly inhabited part of Great Britain, already has one launch pad and they are currently working on a second. Testing is expected to begin within a few months.
• In the year of Sweden’s presidency of the European Union, last Friday, King Carl XVI Gustaf and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen inaugurated Sweden’s Esrange Space Centre in the Arctic Circle as the first mainland Europe spaceport. Founded by the European Space Agency (ESA), in 1966 to study the atmosphere and the Northern Lights, facilities have been developed over recent years to enable vertical rocket launch, with a launch target towards the end of the year or early next year. A phrase many Government ministers used when referring to Spaceport Cornwall was ‘this will be the first satellite launched in Europe’, mostly as an attempt to show Brexit has been a success and the UK can succeed outside of the European Union, and so Esrange has the opportunity not only to have the first launch from mainland Europe, but also the first launch in Europe.

These examples, just in the last week, show how competitive the small satellite launch facility market is just within Europe. It will be exciting to see who achieves their aim first – Cornwall, Shetland, Sweden or other places not mentioned here.

Financing The Space Sector

Two interesting financial investments in relation to EO came out over the last few days from two American companies:

• Capella Space announced on the 10^th January they had secured $60 million in growth equity funding to expand its Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging capabilities following a tripling of annual revenues and a doubling of the amount of imagery collected over the last year. We’ve written about Capella a number of times with their frequent satellite launches over the last few years as they grew their constellation, and it seems as though this will not be ending soon.
• World View is a company focused on the development of stratospheric balloons for EO and tourism, and announced last Friday they are merging with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Leo Holdings Corp. We’ve written about SPAC’s in the space sector previously, and this one could raise almost $121 million in additional capital for the company. In EO terms, the balloons are often referred to as High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS), and World View have remote-controlled balloons called Stratollites, capturing high-resolution imagery as they fly much closer to Earth at around 29 km. HAPS have long been foreseen as a cheaper EO alternative, particularly to geostationary satellites, and it will be interesting to see how this offering develops.

Space Debris

Finally, in last week’s blog, we discussed whether the Virgin Orbit missile and satellites would burn up or fall back to Earth (and it is believed they fell back to Earth). At the same, time NASA announced that the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) which was launched on the 5^th October 1984, returned to Earth on the 8^th January 2023. It’s believed that the majority of the satellite would have burnt up in the atmosphere, although there is the potential that some components could have survived and would have fell to Earth over the Bering Sea in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean.

ERBS mission was to study how the sun’s energy is absorbed and radiated by the Earth, together with monitoring water vapour, aerosols and nitrogen oxide in the stratosphere. It carried three instruments:

• Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) Scanner
• Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) non-scanner
• Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment(SAGE II)

Although the mission was only designed for two years, the mission collected data for almost twenty years before it was decommissioned in 2005. For the last seventeen years it has been essentially space junk, as its orbit deteriorated until it returned to the planet last week, and serves as a reminder of all the satellites that are still up in space many, many years after their launch.