![]() ![]() It turns out that a lot of people have The Right Stuff. In February, Axiom Space will send a four-person crew to the ISS on a Crew Dragon. Blue Origin will fly again in December with a six-person crew while Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and an assistant to the ISS in a flight arranged by Space Adventures. The pace of private human spaceflight shows no sign of letting up. Hayley Arceneaux, part of the Inspiration4 mission, survived bone cancer as a child and flew despite having a titanium prosthetic in her leg. Her record lasted less than two months, broken on the second crewed New Shepard flight by 90-year-old William Shatner, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk. Blue Origin’s first crewed flight set records for both the youngest person to go to space, 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, and the oldest, 82-year-old Wally Funk. What commercial human spaceflight has demonstrated is the diversification of space, with a much wider range of people able to go. After flying Branson, Virgin Galactic raised its prices to $450,000 - and still managed to sell 100 tickets in a matter of months. Unless you’re fortunate enough to be a contest winner or a guest of a company, you’ll have to pay large sums of money to fly. The long-awaited emergence of private human spaceflight has led some to hail the “democratization” of space, but that’s not quite accurate. New Shepard flew again in October at the same time a Russian actress and film director were in the middle of a 12-day stay on the ISS, filming scenes for a movie. In September, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, already taking astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA, made its first commercial flight on the three-day Inspiration4 mission. Nine days later, Blue Origin flew its founder, Jeff Bezos, on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. However, that changed in July when Virgin Galactic flew its founder, Richard Branson, to space on its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane. The Ansari X Prize competition and the occasional tourist flying on a Soyuz in the early 2000s seemed like a false dawn. But the promise of space tourism had long been just that: something that remained just around the corner. For decades, commercial human spaceflight, aka space tourism, had promised to open up space for the wider public, not just professional astronauts. What these people have in common is that they all went to space this year without the assistance of government space agencies. In the end, SpaceNews editors, reporters and trusted advisers agreed on nine individuals, organizations and trends deserving recognition.Ī Dutch teenager. In such a remarkable year for commercial, civil and military space, picking winners wasn’t easy. He added that the first step will be developing a last mile delivery in space transportation.We have also seen record numbers of space startups making their way to Wall Street via mergers with blank check companies, or SPACs, attracting billions of dollars from investors undaunted by a tenacious global pandemic.Īnd we continue to see record numbers of satellites launching to orbit, the upshot of an entrenched smallsat revolution driving even the most hidebound institutions to rewrite their playbooks.Īlongside all of this, we are seeing growing concern about space sustainability driven by not just those record numbers of satellites but also slow progress on space traffic management and a Russian ASAT test that created thousands of pieces of debris in low Earth orbit. Kokorich said that in the big picture, they would like to build the infrastructure for industrialization beyond Earth in space. Although its water plasma engines are crucial to the business, Momentus CEO Mikhail Kokorich in July emphasized that his operation is “not a propulsion company.” Momentus is expected to expand its fleet of transfer vehicles to offer even more powerful and capable ways to deliver satellites to orbit. He added that he believes that Momentus is really the key to commercializing and industrializing the space economy. ![]() ![]() Rather than going through the traditional IPO market, an investor or firm uses a SPAC to raise funds to finance an acquisition within a certain time frame and the company that is acquired is effectively taken public.ĬNBC quoted Stable Road chairman and CEO Brian Kabot as saying that Space is probably the most interesting and unique growth avenue in the U.S. It is expected that the acquisition will close early next year, with Momentus to be listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “MNTS.” Special purpose acquisition company of Stable Road Capital, which is listed under the ticker symbol “SRAC,”is being used to take ‘Momentus’ public. Stable Road Capital will take Momentus public through a SPAC deal that values the company at $1.2 billion. ![]()
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