North America

Satellogic announced that private equity firm, Liberty Strategic Capital, led by former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, is investing US $150M into Earth imaging company Satellogic. The funding will help to close a delayed merger with CF Acquisition Corp. V., a special purpose acquisition corporation for the company to go public.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris charged the National Space Council to focus on the rules and norms governing space, leveraging space to tackle the climate crisis, and building a diverse space and STEM workforce, NASA said. The agency also announced a “strategic, first-of-its-kind partnership" with the European Space Agency (ESA) to observe Earth, its climate and changing environment.

Radian Aerospace (Radian), announced that the company recently closed US $27.5M in seed funding. The round was led by venture capital fund Fine Structure Ventures, with investment from EXOR, The Venture Collective, Helios Capital, SpaceFund, Gaingels, Explorer 1 Fund, Type One Ventures among others.

Rocket Lab has announced the date for its first Electron mission in 2022, which will be a dedicated mission for BlackSky through global launch services provider Spaceflight. Electron is scheduled to launch the “Without Mission A Beat” from New Zealand on 4th February.

Governments around the world spent $6.6 billion on government telecommunications programs in 2021, Euroconsult said. European countries spent over $2 billion on satcom, with France, the UK and Germany as leaders. Over the decade, governments worldwide are forecasted to invest over $70 billion in both civil and defence satellite communications systems.

As part of the partnership between SpaceWatch.Global and Orbital Gateway Consulting we have been granted permission to publish selected articles and texts. We are pleased to present “Dongfang Hour China Aerospace News Roundup 10 - 16 January 2022 ”. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Space News Roundup! I’m Jean Deville, joined as always by my co-host Blaine Curcio.

In this Space Café Radio – our Review 2021 series, SpaceWatch.Global publisher Torsten Kriening spoke with Mani Thiru, head of space and industry development for Asia-Pacific at Amazon Web Services in Singapore about her space highlights in 2021 and what to watch out for the upcoming year in space.

Virgin Orbit deployed seven cubesats for three customers on LauncherOne’s third successful operational flight that took off from air-launch platform Cosmic Girl, a Boeing 747 aircraft. The rocket carried the satellites into low Earth orbit, at an inclination of 45 degrees.

SpaceX successfully launched 105 spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9 launch vehicle yesterday during its third dedicated smallsat rideshare mission, Transporter-3. The rideshare program was announced in 2019, offering small satellite operators to launch for a combined price of US $1M. Transporter-3 carried CubeSats, microsats, PocketQubes,

SpaceX is to launch the Transporter-3 rideshare mission later today, with Brazilian newspace startup, Pion Labs’ PION-BR1 satellite on board, Pion announced. The launch will make history in the Brazilian space sector. PION-BR1 is a 1P pocketqube satellite measuring only 5x5x5 cm, the smallest Brazilian satellite developed to date.