by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

I had the occasion to visit the booths of two German startups, Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg, that are eyeing maiden flights of their small satellite launch vehicles next year.

• Exolaunch’s Most Technologically and Geographically Diverse Mission of Smallsats Launched via SpaceX’s Transporter-3 Rideshare Mission
• Company Completed International Launch Campaign for 29 Satellites, Including Microsatellites, Cubesats up to 16U and PocketQubes
• New and Returning Customers from Four Continents and Seventeen Countries

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., & BERLIN, Germany, January 27, 2022 (Exolaunch PR) – In its third dedicated rideshare mission with SpaceX, Exolaunch, the leading global provider of launch, in-space logistics and deployment services, successfully integrated and launched 29 small satellites from customers across the globe. The company’s rideshare clusters aboard the SpaceX  Transporter-3 mission were an amalgamation of microsats, cubesats (up to 16U) and PocketQubes. The combination of customers from 17 countries across four continents, and an unprecedented number of very sophisticated payloads made it the most technologically rich and geographically spread integration effort for the company yet.

• Satellites for Sen (16U), Dubai Electricity & Water Authority and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology are all operational
• Company plans launch of 14 satellites in 2022, including the industry’s first commercially available modular microsat bus (MP42)

VILNIUS, Lithuania, 20 January 2022 (NanoAvionics PR) – NanoAvionics, a leading smallsat manufacturer and mission integrator, confirmed the reception of signals and healthy telemetry data from all of the three satellites launched into low Earth orbit via the successful SpaceX Transporter-3 mission. The rideshare mission that went into orbit on 13 January 2022 included one of the largest and heaviest CubeSats ever built and launched. The 16U small satellite, is the first of five satellites, contracted to NanoAvionics by British company Sen, to establish video streaming media to provide real-time Ultra-High Definition (UHD) videos of Earth.

• Payloads selected for Spectrum’s maiden flight scheduled for end of 2022
• Five institutions from Germany, Norway and Slovenia with a total of seven small satellites to launch on the first test flight of Isar Aerospace’s launch vehicle “Spectrum”
• For the first time in Europe, the German government entrusts a privately financed European space company with the launch of institutional payloads

MUNICH, 13 December 2021 (Isar Aerospace PR) – Isar Aerospace, the leading and most well-funded private European launch service provider focusing on small and medium satellites, and the German Space Agency at DLR have announced the selection of the institutional payloads for the maiden flight of the “Spectrum” rocket planned for the end of 2022 as part of the microlauncher competition. Among the winners of the Announcement of Opportunity are five institutions from Germany, Norway, and Slovenia with a total of seven small satellites that will be used to demonstrate various technologies in space such as communication or weather data measurement.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., January 07, 2021 (Momentus PR) — Momentus Inc. (“Momentus” or the “Company”), a commercial space company offering in-space infrastructure services, and Orbit NTNU (https://www.orbitntnu.com/), a non-profit student organization stationed at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim designing and building cubesats, today announced a service agreement for the 2U cubesat: SelfieSat.