Business

In July 2015 Planet Labs made a significant purchase in acquiring Lethbridge based Blackbridge and its Rapideye constellation of five satellites. Combined with Planet’s Dove satellites, they are now offering an ever expanding suite of imagery products, with the precision agriculture and mapping segments leading the way.

MDA’s U.S. subsidiary, Space Systems Loral (SSL), today entered into an agreement with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop satellite servicing of spacecraft in geostationary orbit (GEO) for the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program.

It seems every couple of years another group comes along claiming they’ll setup a spaceport in Canada with Nova Scotia being the preferred location. The latest is Maritime Launch Services (MLS), a newly registered company in Nova Scotia with roots in the U.S and the Ukraine. What sets it apart from recent previous efforts is the experienced principals involved.

In this weeks Short Cuts we talk about the upcoming budget, moonshots, the universe as a hologram, the making of the RADARSAT Satellite Constellation, our new feature Startup Files, our new Culture section and more.

Space is hard. While startups success rates are slowly increasing in low earth orbit (LEO), it’s even harder for startups looking beyond low earth orbit. In fact, no company with the goal of operating a commercial enterprise near or on the moon, can call themselves a success, yet. But just maybe we’ll the emergence of one as a the result of the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

In this weeks Short Cuts, Canada funds an instrument which will be key in conducting first-ever global survey of Earth’s surface water, exactEarth announces the results of its first year of operations as a public company, UrtheCast signs binding agreement with a government customer to buy two satellites in its OptiSAR constellation and more.

SEDS Canada, the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), have selected four university applications to participate in the Canadian Reduced Gravity Experiment Design Challenge (CAN-RGX) competition. It is the inaugural year for the competition which received 21 applications from universities across the country, a sure sign that SEDS Canada’s goal of growing its membership is working.

SpaceX and its customers can breathe a sigh of relief today after an instantaneous launch went off without a glitch. The Falcon 9 lifted off at 12:54 p.m. EST and began deploying the first of 10 Iridium satellites 59 minutes later.  At 2:13 p.m. EST SpaceX reported that all of the Iridium satellites had been deployed successfully.

Today at 12:54 p.m. EST, SpaceX should return to flight with the launch of a Falcon 9 on the Iridium 1 mission, if all goes well. There’s a lot riding on this mission, and not just for SpaceX.

In December we wrote a story about MDA’s subsidiary Space Systems Loral (SSL) in the U.S. winning a long sought after satellite servicing contract with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Yesterday, the NASA Future In-Space Operations weekly telecon provided an update on the evolution of NASA Goddard’s satellite servicing efforts including the Restore-L Mission which will see SSL build the spacecraft bus.