TORONTO (SFL PR) – Space Flight Laboratory (SFL), a developer of 52 distinct microspace missions, has been awarded a contract by GHGSat of Montreal to build the next three microsatellites in its commercial greenhouse gas monitoring constellation.

“SFL congratulates GHGSat on its success in providing commercial greenhouse gas monitoring services from space,” said SFL Director, Dr. Robert E. Zee. “This contract highlights GHGSat’s need to expand data collection capacity to meet the growing demand for its valuable services.”

TORONTO, Ontario, Canada, 27 July 2020 – Space Flight Laboratory (SFL), a developer of microspace missions for 22 years, has announced a new line of high-performance, low-cost CubeSat buses. The 3U (“THUNDER”), 6U (“SPARTAN”) and 12U/16U (“JAEGER”) CubeSats complement SFL’s legacy suite of space-heritage nano- and microsatellites, fulfilling mission size requirements from 3 kg to 500 kg.

SFL was among the first in the world to launch CubeSats including the CanX-1 CubeSat in 2003 and CanX-2 in 2008, with capabilities that exceeded the state-of-the-art at that time. Since then SFL focused on somewhat larger, more capable satellites for more challenging missions, garnering a reputation for “quality at low cost.” As SFL delivered high-performance, high-quality microsatellites for more than two decades, the CubeSat market matured, and the number of commercial opportunities increased.

Herndon, Virginia, September 18, 2019 (HawkEye 360 PR) — HawkEye 360 Inc., the first commercial company to use formation flying satellites to create a new class of radio frequency (RF) analytics, today announced it has awarded the manufacturing contract for its next generation of satellites.

Enabled by the company’s $70 million Series B financing in August, this contract will substantially boost on-orbit capacity to serve the company’s rapidly growing customer base. The contract will expand the constellation to 18 satellites, achieving routine revisits of less than an hour for increased global persistence.

Chris Hadfield (Credit: CSA)

TORONTO (University of Toronto News) — The Creative Destruction Lab has helped build dozens of futuristic companies over the years – now it’s seeking entrepreneurs whose ideas are literally out of this world.

Working closely with former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, the seed-stage accelerator affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management is launching a dedicated stream for space startups working on everything from interplanetary transportation to asteroid mining.

The new stream seeks to attract space-focused entrepreneurs from around the world while providing entrepreneurial minded Canadian researchers at places like the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, or UTIAS, with another way to get their innovative ideas off the ground.

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MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. (DSI PR) — Deep Space Industries, Inc. has been selected by HawkEye 360 as the satellite provider for its Pathfinder small satellite mini-constellation. This is the first step towards the launch of the full commercial constellation of HawkEye 360’s space-based radio frequency mapping and analytics system.

Deep Space Industries (DSI) is the prime contractor for the development and manufacturing of the satellites that will host HawkEye 360’s proprietary data processing technology. The system will use space-based detection of radio signals to locate and characterize wireless spectrum information from Earth.

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CanX-4 and CanX-5 are a pair of identical nanosatellites built by the Space Flight Laboratory, and launched in June 2014. (Credit: UTIAS Space Flight Laboratory)

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. (DSI PR) — The world’s first demonstration of autonomous spacecraft maneuvering was recently completed by Silicon Valley-based Deep Space Industries (DSI) and the Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) of Toronto, Canada. Using their highly-successful CanX-4 and CanX-5 pair of nanosatellites, SFL operators executed a DSI-defined experiment on-orbit, in which the world’s first spacecraft-to-spacecraft orbit maneuver was commanded by one satellite and executed by the other.

In this experiment, one of the two spacecraft (CanX-4) autonomously programmed the other (CanX-5) to perform an orbit change using its on-board propulsion system, over a shared S-band Inter-Satellite Link (ISL) radio. CanX-5 subsequently executed the maneuver, raising its orbit, as confirmed by operators at SFL’s Mission Control Center (MCC) in Toronto and data from the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

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