SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 13, 2020 (Astranis PR) — Astranis, the company building the next generation of telecommunication satellites, today announced a $90 million financing round to launch its first commercial satellite and build the foundation for the internet infrastructure of the future. The round was led by Venrock, with significant participation from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz.

Astranis aims to solve a problem in the modern space race that hasn’t been cracked: bringing the next four billion people online with low-cost, reliable internet. The $120 billion market is growing quickly – demand for internet is rising 40% per year, every year – but until now, there has been no practical, cost-effective solution for bringing internet access to remote parts of the world. Astranis is singularly focused on solving this problem.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1, 2018 (Astranis/NanoRacks PR) — Satellite telecommunications company Astranis Space Technologies Corp., in partnership with NanoRacks, a leading provider of commercial access to space, is donating a 1U CubeSat launch to Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, USA (SEDS-USA) to kick off the SEDS SAT-2 competition next month.

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (Bradford PR) — Astranis (www.astranis.com), the San Francisco-based company building the next generation of telecommunications satellites, announced today the selection of Bradford’s (www.bradford-space.com) high performance green ECAPS propulsion for the Astranis MicroGEO spacecraft. The selection slates the integration of eight ECAPS thrusters aboard each Astranis spacecraft, with an initial order for up to twelve spacecraft. The selection also included Electrical Propulsion (EP) feed systems and a set of 8 CoSine Sun Sensors, all produced by the Bradford Space group, involving both the Netherlands and Swedish locations.

This announcement marks the introduction of the ECAPS (www.ecaps.space) propulsion system to geostationary orbit activities, a domain typically dominated by very large telecommunications satellites needing long duration station-keeping capabilities. Traditionally, these satellites have used hydrazine-based thrusters, which are expensive to handle in the loading and pre-launch phase of a spacecraft’s preparation.

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SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off with a Dragon resupply ship on April 2, 2018. (Credit: NASA)

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

SpaceX received $500 million of the nearly $1 billion in investment raised by commercial space companies during the first quarter of 2018, according to the Space Investment Quarterly report from Space Angels.

“SpaceX shows no signs of slowing down—after the inaugural flight of the Falcon Heavy, the company secured $500 million from Fidelity Investments to drive development of their satellite communications network, Starlink,” the report added.

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Another company has emerged that is aiming to provide satellite Internet to under served areas, Tech Crunch reports. Launching from stealth today with a fresh $13.5 million investment led by Andreessen Horowitz is Astranis — the developer of a novel satellite technology that aims to transmit data down to specific terrestrial locations with each satellite it launches. That’s a significant shift from the way companies like SpaceX and OneWeb are […]

Some very sad news to report. Matthew Isakowitz passed away on May 25. He was 29. Matthew served as associate director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) for three years after graduating from Princeton University in 2009. While an undergraduate, he worked for two months at SpaceX on the Dragon spacecraft. After leaving CSF, Matthew worked at the asteroid mining company, Planetary Resources. More recently, he was working at Astranis, […]