Spaceflight Industries’s satcoms unit has partnered with satellite data start-up Spire to use the latter’s ground stations for its smallsat-focused communications network.
The deal adds nine existing sites to locations Spaceflight Networks already…
Spaceflight Industries’s satcoms unit has partnered with satellite data start-up Spire to use the latter’s ground stations for its smallsat-focused communications network.
The deal adds nine existing sites to locations Spaceflight Networks already has in Seattle, Alaska and New Zealand for the standardised low latency data network it has been building since last July.
The system aims to simplify ground station and communications protocols for the burgeoning smallsat sector with spacecraft radios that work ‘out-of-the box’.
San Francisco-based Spire, which raised US$40m last month for its nanosat maritime tracking and weather constellation, will help the group reach 24 online stations by the end of 2015, and more than 45 by the end of 2016.
Chris Wake, Spire’s head of business operations, said: “We deployed our own network of ground stations because nothing like it existed when we began, and we knew that low-latency is essential to capture the real value from a constellation of small satellites — Spaceflight is now making that value readily accessible.”
Spire is looking to launch 20 satellites to low Earth orbit by the end of this year, and aims to deploy spacecraft on a near monthly basis from September 2015.
Its satellites are reportedly set to be among the 87 spacecraft due to be launched this autumn from Spaceflight Industries’s Sherpa platform, which is being placed to LEO as a secondary payload aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. However, Falcon 9 is still grounded following a rocket failure in late June.
The group provides ‘rideshare’ launch services through the Spaceflight Services subsidiary it founded in 2010. It has another unit called Spaceflight Systems, founded in 1999 as Andrews Space, that makes satellite components and spacecraft.
In a further push into the smallsat industry, the company announced an imagery venture last month called BlackSky Global, which envisages a constellation of 60 satellites by 2019.
It said the first six of these satellites have been fully funded by using a portion of the US$28.5m that Spaceflight Industries has raised in total over the last two years.
BlackSky Global CTO Peter Wegner told SatelliteFinance that the first two birds of this initial batch, which has been built internally, have already secured rides as secondary payloads in Q4 2015/Q1 2016.
Spaceflight Industries’s investors include RRE Venture Capital, Vulcan Capital and Razor’s Edge Ventures.
