NASA and the Private Sector - Page 182

Voyager Space Holdings’ fourth acquisition in a little over a year since it was established is a majority stake in the parent company of Nanoracks, a space services and hardware specialist that has sent more than 1,000 missions to the International Space Station.

“Nanoracks is a game changer for us in terms of adding some pretty significant capability in space,” Voyager Space Holdings CEO Dylan Taylor told CNBC.

Voyager intends to take a majority stake in X.O. Markets, the holding company of Nanoracks, in a deal expected to close in the first quarter of 2021.

While Voyager Space Holdings did not disclose the financial details of the deal — with Taylor only noting that “we’re infusing quite a bit of cash in the business” to help it grow — people familiar with the transaction told CNBC that Voyager plans to invest more than $50 million in Nanoracks over the coming year.

The majority stake in X.O. Markets marks Voyager’s fourth deal since its establishment in October 2019. The firm previously acquired rocket and spacecraft services specialist The Launch Company, satellite servicing company Altius Space Machines, and Pioneer Astronautics, the research and development firm of Dr. Robert Zubrin, who is most well known for his discussions with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk about establishing a permanent human presence on Mars.

“We’re an operating company and not a fund, so this is about how we assemble capability,” Taylor said. “Once we’ve assembled all this capability, we can have an outsized influence on the industry because we’re capable of doing really complex and significant missions in space.”

Nanoracks CEO Jeff Manber said he began to look for new capital this past summer, including examining going public on its own through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. But Manber told CNBC that he didn’t want to “spend my next two years” talking to Wall Street investors and “trying to figure out how you stand this up,” rather than stay focused on operating and growing his business.

“With Voyager, we have a platform that allows us to grow into the entire in-space services infrastructure development, with a financial sophistication and synergy that we just frankly would not have on our own,” Manber said. “They give us the stability. They give us the platform. They give us some of the expertise that we don’t have today.”

In return, Manber sees Nanoracks “providing the core” of Voyager’s space efforts, with new access to the company’s mission control room in Houston, Texas, as well as facilities across the country and talent that has experience working with a variety of payloads that have gone to space.

The deal also comes after Nanoracks completed significant milestones in installing its Bishop Airlock on the International Space Station on Saturday. Nanoracks fully-funded the airlock’s development and manufacturing, launching it to the ISS on a Dec. 6 SpaceX cargo mission.

The first-ever private airlock, Bishop adds five times the payload capacity as the current and government-operated JEM airlock. NASA noted that Bishop’s addition “significantly increases the capacity for public and private research,” which “also enables the deployment of larger satellites and the transfer of spacewalking tools and hardware inside and outside the station.”

“Nanoracks is the largest commercial user of the International Space Station,” Manber said. “We’re the space station guys — we understand space stations better than probably any commercial emerging company in the world.”

Nanoracks has about 70 employees around the world, with its headquarters in Houston. The company also has presence in Washington, D.C., as well as offices in Torino, Italy and the United Arab Emirates’ Abu Dhabi.

Manber sees Nanoracks’ growth in a strategy of three pillars, the first of which is its current utilization of the ISS.

“The Bishop airlock is our largest growth catalyst going forward with that,” Manber said.

But “the space station is aging,” Manber said, so he wants Nanoracks to be involved in “private space stations that are market-focused” moving forward. He expects “small private space stations,” each focused on individual markets, will be launched in the coming decade, with “some hotels and some for professional astronauts.” So Nanoracks’ “second pillar” is its Outpost Program, which plans to repurpose the large discarded fuel tanks of rockets that are in orbit around the Earth into small space stations.

Nanoracks first Outpost technology demonstration, called Mars Demo-1, is scheduled to fly on a SpaceX rideshare launch in June 2021. The mission will use a robotic arm to cut metal material in space, to demonstrate Nanoracks can cut rocket fuel tanks safely, key to turning them into orbiting hubs. Manber hopes Nanoracks will then launch a follow-on mission in 2023 and then “each year stay in space longer and longer and converting these otherwise empty platforms.”

“The third pillar is to become a customer of in-space research,” Manber said. “In-space research is a market that has been totally government dominated, funded by space agencies with occasional involvement of a commercial company like a pharmaceutical company or [agricultural] tech company.”

Nanoracks’ in-space research service would help more companies “use the harsh environment of space to create new products.”

Manber described his three pillars strategy as “emulating what SpaceX is doing,” by taking a core business and then building upon it steadily.

’This industry is getting very serious now, and it’s an important industry from a commercial view,” Manber. “The more [Nanoracks] talked to a number of family funds and hedge funds, the more I looked at it and realized the way the industry is going.”

Joining Voyager is Manber’s way of “aligning” Nanoracks so that it doesn’t have one single project or program that it’s dependent upon for success.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX bought two deepwater oil rigs last year and is converting them into floating launchpads, to support the enormous Starship rockets that the company is developing.

The rigs are in the Port of Brownsville, near SpaceX’s Starship development facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

The rigs have been renamed Deimos and Phobos, presumably in homage to the Martian moons.

Starship is the enormous rocket that SpaceX is developing to meet Musk’s goal of launching cargo and as many as 100 people at a time on missions to the moon and Mars.

The rocket is SpaceX’s top priority, with SpaceX flying its most recent prototype on to its highest altitude yet during a test flight in December. The Starship prototype launched to about 40,000 feet in altitude and completed several development objectives, despite exploding on impact when it attempted to land.

Public records show that Valaris “ultra-deepwater semi-submersible” oil rigs 8500 and 8501 were sold for $3.5 million each. Valaris, headquartered in Houston, Texas and the world’s largest owner of offshore oil rigs, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August as it sought to lighten a heavy debt load.

The pair of rigs was purchased in July 2020 by limited liability corporation Lone Star Mineral Development, according to public records. Lone Star Mineral Development was incorporated in June 2020 and registered in the name of SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen.

SpaceX’s purchase and work on the oil rigs was first identified by reporters for NASASpaceflight, a space-focused website.

The company did not respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Musk, shortly before Lone Star Mineral Development was incorporated, explained in a tweet that SpaceX plans to build “floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth.”

SpaceX has been publicly hiring for offshore operations positions since last year, when the company posted that it was building “a team of engineers and technicians to design and build an operational offshore rocket launch facility.”

Additionally, at the time of publishing there were two temporary offshore positions currently available in Brownsville, Texas on the company’s career website. One of those two positions is for an electrician, and asks that candidates be able to “install enhancements and major upgrades to offshore vessel electrical systems.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning to send its first “all-civilian” crew to space at the end of 2021 in a charity-focused mission commanded by tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman. The company said in a press release it’ll pick three people to ride alongside Isaacman to orbit aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule.

Isaacman, a trained pilot and the chief executive of Shift4 Payments, donated $100 million to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, he said in a press release. He also plans to donate the other three Crew Dragon seats for the trip to people “who will be selected to represent the mission pillars of leadership, hope, generosity and prosperity.” SpaceX in a separate statement said the seats will go “to individuals from the general public who will be announced in the weeks ahead.”

The mission, named Inspiration4, will launch from SpaceX’s 39A launch site stationed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew will launch atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket and get special training from SpaceX, with “a specific focus on orbital mechanics, operating in microgravity, zero gravity, and other forms of stress testing.”

The four-person crew will spend a few days in acorn-shaped Crew Dragon capsule as it orbits Earth every 90 minutes “along a customized flight path,” SpaceX said.

SpaceX has launched two crews to space already, but those were with trained NASA astronauts — including one astronaut from Japan’s space agency — on government-funded trips to the International Space Station. The Inspiration4 mission marks SpaceX’s second fully private mission to be announced. The company’s upcoming Ax-1 mission hosts a crew of four private astronauts paying $55 million each for an eight-day trip to the ISS.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Freed from his daily obligations at Amazon.com Inc, Jeff Bezos is expected to turn up the heat on his space venture, Blue Origin, as it faces a pivotal year and fierce competition from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, industry sources said.

The 57-year-old Bezos, a lifelong space enthusiast and the world’s second-richest person behind Musk, said last week he is stepping down as chief executive of the e-commerce company as he looks to focus on personal projects.

Blue Origin has fallen far behind SpaceX on orbital transportation, and lost out to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA) on billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. national security launch contracts which begin in 2022. ULA is a joint venture of Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp.

Now, Blue Origin is battling to win a competition with SpaceX and Dynetics to develop a new lunar lander for NASA’s potentially multibillion-dollar push to return humans to the moon in a few years. Dynetics is owned by Leidos Holdings Inc.

Winning the lunar lander contract - and executing its development - are seen by Bezos and other executives as vital to Blue Origin establishing itself as a desired partner for NASA, and also putting Blue on the road to turning a profit, the people said.

With limited revenue streams, Bezos has been liquidating about $1 billion of Amazon stock annually to fund Blue, which he said in 2018 was “the most important work that I’m doing.”

A Blue Origin representative declined to comment, but pointed to comments Bezos made last week when he said he was stepping down as Amazon’s chief executive.

He told Amazon employees he would “stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives” but also devote time to Blue Origin and various philanthropic and media “passions.”

NASA is expected to winnow the lunar lander contest to just two companies by the end of April, adding pressure as Blue Origin works through problems such as wasting millions of dollars on procurement, and technical and production challenges, the sources said.

One of the development struggles Blue has faced is getting the lander light and small enough to fit on a commercially available rocket, two people briefed on the development said.

Another source, however, said Blue has modified its design since it was awarded the initial contract last April and that its current design fits on an additional number of available and forthcoming rockets, including Musk’s Falcon Heavy and ULA’s Vulcan.

“He is going to kick Blue Origin into a higher gear,” said one senior industry source with knowledge of Blue’s operations.

Bezos already has transplanted Amazon’s culture on Blue, down to enforcing similar “leadership principles” and kicking off meetings by reading documents in silence, sources say.

But one industry veteran said Bezos needs to take a hands-on, operational role if he is going to fix a number of problems like bureaucratic processes, missed deadlines, high overhead and engineer turnover which, according to this source, have emerged as Blue Origin seeks to transition from development to production across multiple programs.

One person familiar with the matter said that Bezos has no desire to immerse himself completely in daily operations, and instead would prioritize major initiatives and new endeavors.

In his latest Instagram posts, Bezos is seen climbing into a crew capsule wearing cowboy boots, and sitting in his pickup truck watching a rocket engine test, which he described as a “perfect night!”

Founded in 2000, Blue Origin, based in Kent, Washington, has expanded to around 3,500 employees, with sprawling manufacturing and launch facilities in Texas, Florida and Alabama.

Its ambitious portfolio includes selling suborbital tourist trips to space, heavy-lift launch services for satellites, and the lander - none of which is yet fully commercially viable.

Recent data shows Blue has overcome combustion stability problems on its BE-4 rocket engine - another business line, two sources said. Test engines for ULA’s inaugural Vulcan rocket are expected to arrive at Florida’s Cape Canaveral this week, with the first-flight engines and booster coming later this spring, one added.

By comparison, Musk’s SpaceX, founded two years after Blue Origin, has launched its Falcon 9 boosters more than 100 times, launched the world’s most powerful operational rocket - Falcon Heavy - three times, and transported astronauts to the International Space Station.

SpaceX said on Thursday it had 10,000 users on its nascent satellite-based broadband service, dubbed Starlink, which Musk says will provide crucial funding to develop his Starship rocket for missions to the moon and, eventually, Mars.

Blue is also hoping for a steady stream of revenue for its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket - potentially set for a debut late this year - from Amazon’s forthcoming constellation of some 3,200 satellites dubbed Project Kuiper, sources say.

Amazon aims to have half the constellation in orbit by 2026, but there is no public timeline for a first launch.

Until now, Bezos has devoted one day a week to Blue Origin, with conference room meetings replaced in recent months by video calls, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the sources said.