NorthStar Inks Partnership with Telespazio for Space Domain Awareness

Stewart Bain, CEO and Co-Founder of NorthStar (left) and Luigi Pasquali, CEO of Telespazio sign partnership agreement. Credit: NorthStar Earth & Space.

NorthStar Earth & Space continues to add to its European portfolio of partnerships, this time signing a distribution and partnership agreement at the World Satellite Business Week with Telespazio, the joint venture between Leonardo and Thales.

NorthStar and Telespazio are not strangers. The Space Alliance, which is comprised of Telespazio and Thales Alenia Space, was an early investor NorthStar. And in October 2020 they announced that their initial 12 satellites would be using a commercial bus built by Seattle based LeoStella. LeoStella is a joint venture between Thales Alenia Space and Spaceflight Industries.

Three of NorthStar’s space domain awareness (SDA) satellites were to have launched this year, however they won’t be ready for launch until next year.

In a press release NorthStar said that “under the agreement, Telespazio will serve as NorthStar’s exclusive distributor and value-added solutions provider for European Ministries of Defence, Governments, Agencies and Institutions, reinforcing its role as a trusted operator and space services provider for the most demanding government customers.”

Stewart Bain, CEO and Co-Founder of NorthStar said of the agreement, “NorthStar is committed to the peaceful and sustainable use of space. We deliver valuable information that enhances detection and precision tracking of space objects in LEO, MEO & GEO to support greater safety and security of space operations and encourage responsible behaviour in orbit. Telespazio is a global space leader that has an exceptional international reach and an unmatched track record with European entities.”

Luigi Pasquali, CEO of Telespazio added “NorthStar’s space-based collection and suite of derived SSA information services will deliver a unique “always on” 3D view of the entire space environment. NorthStar’s unprecedented data quality and fast revisit enable Telespazio to refine our ability to detect, track, predict, identify and characterize space objects and debris which is critical to address sophisticated market requirements, for example in Defence applications.”

About Marc Boucher

Boucher is an entrepreneur, writer, editor & publisher. He is the founder of SpaceQ Media Inc. and CEO and co-founder of SpaceRef Interactive LLC. Boucher has 20+ years working in various roles in the space industry and a total of 30 years as a technology entrepreneur including creating Maple Square, Canada's first internet directory and search engine.

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