The rocket company that aims to undercut SpaceX on cost will launch 3 missions from Virginia in 2018

• Rocket builder Vector will launch three orbital missions with Virginia Space.
• "We need to break the classic handcuffs on the costs of launching," Vector CEO Jim Cantrell told CNBC in an exclusive interview.
• Vector is targeting its first launch from Virginia for July.

Rocket company Vector will conduct three commercial missions from Virginia Space's Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops launch center.

This is the first orbital contract with a spaceport for Vector, the next major step toward the company's goal of launching more than 100 times per year, chief executive Jim Cantrell told CNBC in an exclusive interview.

"These will go all the way into orbit with satellites on board," Cantrell said. "We need to break the classic handcuffs on the costs of launching, and that requires people thinking differently."

     

The Vector-R vehicle is a low-cost rocket intended to meet the growing demand from the microsatellite sector, which is expected to become a $7.5 billion industry in five years. At less than $3 million per launch, Vector is aiming for a 20th the cost of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

An additional advantage for Vector, Cantrell said, is its mobility. Vector requires minimal infrastructure to launch its rockets — as little as a concrete pad.

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Vector is targeting its first Wallops launch for July, with two or three more in the second half of the year. The contract includes an option for five more launches, a possibility Cantrell is optimistic about.

Dale Nash, CEO and executive director of Virginia Space, told CNBC that Cantrell's rapid cadence vision is possible from his spaceport.

"It's entirely conceivable that, with the three separate launch locations on Wallops, we could launch three rockets in one day," Nash said.

Vector Space Systems

A Vector Space Systems “Vector-R” rocket sits next to a launch tower at the Virginia Space mid-Atlantic regional spaceport (MARS), located on the southern portion of NASA Wallops Island.

The only issue with the spaceport, both leaders noted, is the difficulty of using it to launch vehicles into polar orbits, which are necessary for some satellites. Cantrell said Vector would likely consider other locations, like Alaska Aerospace's on Kodiak Island.

Cantrell called the next three launch vehicles "prototypes," meaning that they will be built by hand. This traditional method — used by every rocket manufacturer from United Launch Alliance to Elon Musk's SpaceX — is not the future for Vector, however. Cantrell says Vector will soon have a 40,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Tucson, Arizona.

"Part of the goal with going for a full assembly-like production is cost reductions," Cantrell said before comparing his plans to the automotive industry. "It is rare with autos to have 'lemons' because modern manufacturers are extremely reliable, and we're emulating that product."

With $31 million in funding led by Sequoia — one of Silicon Valley's best-known venture capital firms — Vector is in the final stages of negotiating its first customers. "We have four different companies we're negotiating contracts with for the first four launches in 2018," Cantrell said.

BY Michael Sheetz

Source: https://goo.gl/6cxadU

As fear of a space war mounts, US Air Force taps start-up technology

 
Steven Puetzer | Getty Images

Tapping Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch some of its satellites is only the beginning in a larger top-to-bottom rethink of the way the U.S. Air Force approaches its operations in space. Air Force officials want to move faster when addressing emerging threats and future missions in orbit, and it's increasingly looking to start-ups to address a deepening sense that America's dominance in space is eroding.

The goal: to protect our satellites and spacecraft from cyberwarfare and missile attack. This is critical, since space weapons could be used to compromise navigation, surveillance, communications and other functions in wartime or during a national emergency.

The shift comes as the space domain is already receiving increased attention from lawmakers and the Department of Defense and, in the years ahead, likely more defense dollars as well. The Pentagon's Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center — known by the unwieldy acronym JICSPOC — was recently rebranded the National Space Defense Center, and under pressure from Congress, the Air Force this month created a new position for a three-star general that will serve as a kind of space czar, advising the Air Force Secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

That general will "come to work every day focused on this: making sure we can organize, train and equip our forces to meet the challenges in this domain," Gen. Jay Raymond, head of Air Force Space Command, said last week at the National Space Symposium in Colorado.

Part of that job of training, organizing and equipping the U.S. military's space forces could fall to smaller, more agile companies outside of the Air Force's conventional supply chain of major defense and aerospace contractors, Raymond suggested. Though procurement programs for new satellites and rockets have long been measured in years — sometimes decades — threats and challenges in the space domain are now moving much faster as potential adversaries like China hone their capabilities in space. "I really see a need to go fast," he told his audience. "We are developing ways to go fast."

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Though international agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibit the positioning of weapons in space, the Pentagon is increasingly aware of the vulnerabilities there. As more and more countries develop advanced rocketry programs and cyber capabilities, it grows more and more difficult to defend critical military satellites that provide U.S. air, ground and sea forces with intelligence, communications, navigation and targeting capabilities.

In a serious conflict with a sophisticated adversary — Russia or China, for example — those satellites would likely be among the first targeted. Both countries (as well as the United States) have successfully tested anti-satellite weapons capable of destroying satellites in orbit. Military officials have also expressed repeated concerns about cyber vulnerabilities that could allow an enemy to jam satellite transmissions or otherwise disable space assets remotely.

For these private space companies, the future is now, and the final frontier is in reach

Source: Independence-X

On Saturday, the Kennedy Space Center is playing host to a launch by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX.

The Falcon 9 rocket's highly anticipated voyage is the latest symbol of how commercial space flight is firing up the public's imagination, and taking extraterrestrial exploration to the next level.

Not to be outdone by SpaceX, however, are two companies that lack Musk's star power but have become active players in a new space race that many observers speculate will become the next major source of wealth creation.

Moon Express and Planetary Resources are two start-ups in the white-hot global space sector that the FAA estimates is a combined $324 billion, and what some argue could become the first trillion-dollar industry. Industry players believe space exploration is due for a quantum leap, with commercial test launches abounding this year.

"This is the first post-global enterprise," said Chris Lewicki, president and CEO of Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company.

While asteroid mining tends to conjure images of video games from the 1980s, Planetary Resources has its sights zeroed in on a future likely to be pioneered, if not dominated, by private companies.

"The first space colonies, tourist destinations, commercial laboratories all will be enabled by the business that we're growing," Lewicki told CNBC recently.

"Bringing back moon materials sounds much more complicated than it really is, for gravity is your friend."-Naveen Jain, co-founder, Moon Express

Begun six years ago, Planetary Resources calls Redmond, Washington, its home. With around 60 scientists, engineers, businessmen and economists, Planetary Resources works outside of NASA's shadow but has access to a nearby Boeing aerospace base and has broken ground on a European headquarters in Luxembourg.

The company's first satellite was "lost in spectacular fashion" in a launch explosion in 2014, according to Lewicki. Yet a successful July 2015 launch put the Planetary Resources back on track.

Two of its next experimental satellites, called Arkyd 6, will launch this year, with the first planned in coming months. The Arkyd 200 mission will explore an asteroid, specifically to locate water and measure its abundance.

"The fall of 2020 is our aim date for the first commercial mission, by the name Arkyd 200," Lewicki said. "We're in the detailed mission planning stages right now."

"If we have a successful result in 2020, the next mission will follow anywhere between two and four years later to extract a lot more water," Lewicki said.

Meanwhile, billionaire entrepreneur Naveen Jain is trying to engineer a soft lunar landing for his company, Moon Express, sometime this year.

Moon Express has won more than $500,000 under NASA's Innovative Lunar Demonstration Data Program, and $1.25 million as a part of Google's Lunar XPRIZE competition. The latter will award $30 million to the first company that lands a commercial spacecraft on the moon, travels 500 meters across its surface and sends high-definition images and video back to Earth.

The Florida based company recently licensed Cape Canaveral launch complexes from the Air Force. Jain believes that the plethora of options for rocket providers means that Moon Express can launch easily — from its existing five rocket contract with Rocket Lab to any other corporation in the mix, be it Virgin Galactic, Amazon's Blue Origin, SpaceX or Boeing.

Within 12 to 24 months of the first mission, Moon Express aims to send a second module to begin extracting resources.

"Once we land on the moon, what we're really doing is building an underlying infrastructure," Jain said. "Bringing back moon materials sounds much more complicated than it really is, for gravity is your friend."

Planetary Resources

The Arkyd 100 (A100) small satellite used by Planetary Resources to gather compositional data of asteroids during prospecting missions.

Both companies have courted tens of millions of dollars in private investment to fund R&D and initial missions. Until the Arkyd 200 reaches an asteroid or the MX-1E lands on the moon, the cornerstone of both business models remains in doubt.

However, both Lewicki and Jain insist their companies do not need to return materials to Earth to turn a profit.

"People think about asteroid mining as going deep into space, mining and bringing the materials back to Earth," Lewicki said. "But our business model is to be the lead in building space infrastructure."

Scouting for 'the eight continent'

Among the moon's mineral riches are gold and helium-3, a gas that can be used in future fusion reactors to provide nuclear power without radioactive waste. Jain said Moon Express' work will be more akin to collecting than traditional mining, as the minerals are from asteroids impacted on the surface.

However, the most important resource is water, which both executives emphasize as integral to building the sector and containing costs.

"Water is the perfect rocket fuel and the perfect fuel for humans. If you reduce the amount of weight from fuel at launch, you vastly reduce the cost," Jain said.

With only a few test launches remaining and both companies fully funded — Planetary Resources even claims to be already profitable — optimism among the industry's pioneer class is palpable.

"You have to realize this as the biggest industry in human history," Lewicki said. "We're now not limited by the land mass and population limits of planet Earth."

Jain argued that the moon will soon become as accessible as Australia, an outer space Outback. It "really can become an eighth continent," he said. He hopes Moon Express succeeds in a way that is visible to other aspiring entrepreneurs in the commercial space industry.

"Our landing on the moon will be the event which inspires people to take their own moon shot," Jain said.

By Michael Sheetz

Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/17/commercial-space-companies-pioneer-the-final-frontier.html

Meet the 2015 CNBC Disruptor 50 companies

In the third annual Disruptor 50 list, CNBC features private companies in 16 industries—from aerospace to financial services to cybersecurity to retail—whose innovations are revolutionizing the business landscape. These forward-thinking upstarts have identified unexploited niches in the marketplace that have the potential to become billion-dollar businesses, and they rushed to fill them. In the process, they are creating new ecosystems for their products and services. Unseating corporate giants is no easy feat. (Tweet this.) But we ranked those venture capital–backed companies doing the best job. Already it's hard to think of the world without them. Read more about the list ranking and the methodology.

1	Moderna Therapeutics	Reprogramming cells to fight disease.
2	SpaceX	Elon Musk's mission to Mars.
3	Bloom Energy	Live off the grid; keep the lights on.
4	Uber	A $50 billion on-demand ride.
5	Airbnb	The newest idea in room service: Renting one.
6	Dropbox	Saving a billion files every day.
7	Palantir Tech	Helped find Bin Laden. Don't like to talk about it.
8	TransferWise	Getting bankers out of the forex biz.
9	Slack	Giving "slacker" a whole new meaning.
10	Warby Parker	Taking on the Luxottica eyewear machine.
11	Houzz	If you rebuild it ...
12	LISNR	Using sound to make waves in the app world.
13	DocuSign	Read their lips: No new faxes.
14	SurveyMonkey	Questions for everyone.
15	Quirky	Crowdsourcing an idea for basement tinkerers.
16	Pure Storage	Predicting a flash flood of data.
17	Oscar	Health insurance for the Obamacare era.
18	Personal Capital	A 360-degree view of your finances.
19	Blippar	An augmented reality check for your smartphone.
20	GitHub	Cracking the code on collaboration.
21	Synack	The white-hat army.
22	GENBAND	Disrupting telecom by helping the disrupted.
23	Motif Investing	Building theme-based portfolios online.
24	Hampton Creek	The egg comes first; no chicken necessary.
25	SoFi	Trying to ease the student-debt crisis.
26	ZenPayroll	Changing the way we get paid.
27	MongoDB	Solving humongous data problems.
28	Rent the Runway	Nice dress. Can I borrow it?
29	Intarcia Therapeutics	A better way to treat diabetes.
30	HackerRank	Helping nerds get hired.
31	Coinbase	The closest thing bitcoin has to a central bank.
32	SugarCRM	Building a better Salesforce.
33	Klarna	No cart left behind.
34	Wealthfront	Silicon Valley’s plan to oust wealth managers.
35	Pinterest	The world's bulletin board.
36	Betterment	Robo-advising for the masses.
37	Dollar Shave Club	Disrupting the cutting edge.
38	Optoro	On a mission to turn trash into treasure.
39	Hearsay Social	Teaching Wall Street to tweet.
40	Square	Saying good-bye to "cash only."
41	Twilio	A stealth giant tapping into telecom’s mobile moment.
42	Impossible Foods	Introducing the meatless, cheeseless cheeseburger.
43	Birchbox	Free samples, for a price.
44	Nutanix	Breaking companies out of their IT handcuffs.
45	DraftKings	Fantasy sports without the real-life commitment.
46	Narrative Science	Here come the robo-writers.
47	Spotify	The most controversial act in music.
48	Qubole	Big-data turnkey service with a smile.
49	Nextdoor	A social network for neighborhoods.
50	Snapchat	The app for selfie photo lovers.