January 9, 2022

The SPAC Boom Hasn't Guaranteed Winners (Source: Axios)
Not all companies are fit to go public via SPAC, despite so many of them doing so. While SPACs were quickly touted as a faster and better way for companies to go public, ultimately not all businesses that have chosen that route are meeting investor expectations. Nearly 200 companies have completed mergers with U.S.-listed SPACs since the beginning of 2021, across a range of sectors, including software, biotech, electric vehicles and sports betting.

SPAC stock redemptions started to pick up over the summer, with most in July at above 50%, signaling some investor discontent. There's also been an uptick in merger cancellations. "For the 262 SPAC mergers that were completed during 2020 and 2021, the average stock price on Dec. 31, 2021, was $8.70, considerably below the average price of more than $10 per share at which the stocks traded at the time of the merger," says Jay Ritter, professor at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business, who used SPAC Research data.

Only a quarter (65 out of the 262) traded above $10, although some were above $35 per share (e.g., Heliogen, Virgin Orbit and CompoSecure). "The average stock price decline during the post-merger ('deSPAC') period for the 2020-2021 cohorts is noteworthy, given that the stock market finished 2021 near an all-time high," adds Ritter. (1/8)

Diving SPACs Are a Warning for Aerospace Startups (Source: Wall Street Journal)
For speculative aerospace startups, taking off gets harder when market winds suddenly turn against you. Last year consolidated special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, as the preferred way to list firms that make no money but promise cosmic returns. Aerospace has fully embraced them, starting with British billionaire Richard Branson’s space-tourism venture, Virgin Galactic , in 2019 and then through a raft of small-satellite launchers—such as Rocket Lab and Astra Space.

Almost all space/aerospace startups have taken a beating over the past three months. Virgin Galactic shares were down 46%. Virgin Orbit shares closed up 24% but are still down 12% since its 30 December SPAC merger. (1/8)

Roscosmos Air Detachment Carries Students, Cadets from Baikonur to Moscow (Source: TASS)
Students and cadets have been carried from Baikonur City to Moscow after winter vacation by an air detachment of Roscosmos. "A Roscosmos air detachment has carried 30 students and cadets that spent New Year vacation at home in Baikonur, to Moscow from Baikonur City," the press service said. Protests erupted in several Kazakh cities on January 2, escalating into mass riots with government buildings getting ransacked in several cities a few days later. The ensuing violence left scores of people injured, with fatalities also being reported. (1/8)

What Happens When Someone Dies in Space? Space Tourism Brings New Legal and Moral Issues (Source: The Conversation)
The question of what to do if someone dies in space will become significantly more pertinent – and complex – when humans embark on longer missions deeper into space, and even one day become permanently established in space. Fundamentally, there will need to be some sort of investigative process put in place to establish the cause of death of humans in outer space. There have been inquests before, such as the inquiry into the Columbia Shuttle disaster in 2003.

It is inevitable, either through accidents, illness or age, that deaths in space or on another celestial body will occur. A formal procedure for investigating deaths on long-duration missions and space settlements will be necessary to ensure there is clear information on who died, the causes of death, and so lessons can be learned and possible patterns detected. Having an agreement in place at the outset of a mission is even more important if there are a number of countries participating.

Countries may object to having a human corpse floating in space, while the body itself may contribute to the growing issues created by space debris. The family of the deceased might want their loved one’s body returned to them. Disposal of human remains on a colony is similarly fraught. The body of a settler buried on another planet may biologically contaminate that planet. Cremation is also likely to contaminate, and could be resource-intensive. In time, there will undoubtedly be technical solutions to the storage and disposal of human remains in space. But the ethical issues around death in space cut across anthropological, legal and cultural boundaries. (1/7)

Why Did Australia Sign the Moon Treaty? (Source: The Interpreter)
International space law has again become a theatre of geopolitical competition. Unlike the bipolar space race of the Cold War era, a proliferating cast of countries and corporations are developing spacefaring capacity, testing the limits of existing law. China recently matched the United States in landing a probe on Mars, where Elon Musk’s SpaceX intends to land a crewed mission by 2026. India and ESA have joined the US, China and Russia in successful lunar missions, and Luxembourg and the UAE have passed domestic legislation to position themselves as launchpad jurisdictions in this new era of competitive space activity.

The 1979 Moon Treaty has a tenuous place in international law. Its common heritage provisions were rejected by both the US and the Soviet Union, and it remains one of the most unpopular multilateral treaties, ratified by only 18 countries. The Hawke government acceded to the Moon Treaty in 1986. By signing on to the US-centric Artemis Accords, Australia has placed itself in seeming conflict with its older treaty commitment to an international regime to oversee space resource extraction. Moreover, it has done so without any public statement on the matter. In current legal and industry circles, the question of why Australia signed the unpopular Moon Treaty is often raised but rarely answered.

The Moon Treaty’s central principle – that an international regime should oversee extractive activity in space – was unpopular during the Cold War and remains so today. The question of how space resource extraction should be regulated, left unsettled for decades, is now becoming urgent again. China and Russia have recently responded to the US Artemis initiative by inviting foreign participation in a joint International Lunar Research Station, with its own set of rules. (1/7)

Successful Launch for OneWeb, but Continuing Mystery About Service Start (Source: Capacity)
Satellite company OneWeb finished 2021 on a high, with another successful launch, but the date of its commercial start is still unclear. French company Arianespace carried out OneWeb’s twelfth launch on 27 December, with 36 satellites on board, making eight launches in the year – all successful. The company plans more launches in 2022, to achieve its goal of 648 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites in operation, with one in February from French Guiana, one in March from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, and then five more from Baikonur.

However OneWeb has still not confirmed when it will be able to offer wholesale services to its partners, including AT&T and BT. A year ago, Sunil Bharti Mittal, executive chairman of OneWeb, told Capacity that the company would be able to offer commercial services via wholesale partners by the end of October 2021 to areas north of 50° N latitude – an area covering the whole of the UK, plus Alaska, northern Canada, Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe.

Sources suggested to Capacity in December that the company is running five to six months behind this schedule, with start of services likely in March or April 2022. A source told Capacity after the December launch that “we are not six months delayed.” ... “It’s a bit too early to say when we will launch services for UK customers, and we’re looking to do some lab and customer trials early next year [2022].” (1/6)

Scientists Contemplate Launching Tiny Lifeforms Into Interstellar Space (Source: SciTech Daily)
No longer solely in the realm of science fiction, the possibility of interstellar travel has appeared, tantalizingly, on the horizon. Although we may not see it in our lifetimes — at least not some real version of the fictional warp-speeding, hyperdriving, space-folding sort — we are having early conversations of how life could escape the tether of our solar system, using technology that is within reach.

Small probes with onboard instrumentation that sense, collect and transmit data back to Earth will be propelled up to 20-30% of the speed of light by light itself using a laser array stationed on Earth, or possibly the moon. “When I learned that the mass of these craft could reach gram levels or larger, it became clear that they could accomodate living animals,” said Joel Rothman, who realized that the creatures he’d been studying for decades, called C. elegans, could be the first Earthlings to travel between the stars.

These intensively studied roundworms may be small and plain, but they are experimentally accomplished creatures, Rothman said. “Research on this little animal has led to Nobel prizes to six researchers thus far,” he noted. Thousands of these tiny creatures could be placed on a wafer, put in suspended animation, and flown in that state until reaching the desired destination. They could then be wakened in their tiny StarChip and precisely monitored for any detectable effects of interstellar travel on their biology, with the observations relayed to Earth by photonic communication. (1/8)

The Industrialization of Space (Source: SaltWire)
It will be a bumper year for big space launches to the Moon, Mars, and asteroids, including many manned flights, but the real shocker is the number of satellites and spaceships being launched by private companies. Never mind Elon Musk’s 12,000-small-satellite Starlink program, which is already becoming a traffic hazard after only 1,892 satellites have been launched, 60 at a time. (The Chinese have lodged a complaint.) There are 39 other companies in eleven different countries whose vehicles are scheduled to make their maiden flights this year.

There’s Blue Whale 1 from Perigee Aerospace in South Korea, Agnibaan from AgniKul Cosmos in India, and RFA One from Rocket Factory Augsburg in Germany. Not to mention Hyperbola-2 from i-Space in China, Eris from Gilmour Space Technologies in Australia, and Terran 1 from Relativity Space in the United States. It’s like 1910, when there were hundreds of start-up car manufacturers in the world. Space transport is becoming an industrial-scale operation now like road transport was then, and everybody with an alternative approach that might fly is piling in. (1/7)

Virgin Orbit Stock Pops More Than 20% as Branson’s Company Shows Off Rocket in Times Square (Source: CNBC)
Richard Branson’s satellite-launching company Virgin Orbit brought a rocket to show off in New York City on Friday, as it celebrated going public. “There’s a rocket in Times Square; but there happens to be [another] one on an airplane right now ... we’re doing stuff and I think, at the end of the day, that’s what matters,” Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart told CNBC. He rang the Nasdaq opening bell on Friday. Virgin Orbit stock jumped as much as 26% in trading from its previous close of $6.49 a share. (1/7)

Space India 2021–Low for ISRO, High for Startups (Source: Saisat Daily
In India’s impressive journey in space technology over the decades, the year 2021 could well go down as a low performance one. It saw the usually busy Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) rather subdued in its missions and launches. The silver lining was the hectic activity in the private sector interest and start up space. With the shadow of COVID-19 extending into 2021 and impacting most sectors of the economy, Space was no exception. With just two launches of which one was a failure, the usually high performing ISRO did not particularly cover itself in glory.

If one examines the strides made by US, China and Russia during the same period the contrast becomes very striking. These nations have on the contrary managed to up their space mission activities considerably during the pandemic. The Chinese and Americans have done nearly 50 launch missions. Overall, the performance of ISRO nosedived in 2020 and 2021 though India had a comparatively good record in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. The Indian economy also started recovering well from 3rd quarter. Simple statistics show that the ISRO achieved two successful launches in 2020, and one success and one failure in 2021. (1/7)

From Contractor to Satellite Operator: Q&A with Sidus Space CEO Carol Craig (Source: Space News)
Sidus Space became a public company in December to help transform the Space Coast government contractor into a commercial satellite constellation operator.  The company raised $15 million by listing shares Dec. 14 on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the SIDU symbol, without a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger that other space companies have recently been using to go public.

The shares priced at $5 each on the Nasdaq Capital Market, Nasdaq’s least-stringent tier intended for early-stage companies with relatively small market capitalizations, and closed up at $12.19 after its first day of trading, before slumping to around $9 as this article went to press. Proceeds from the listing will help Sidus grow an international sales team and buy 3D printers and other hardware for a network of 100 satellites, which the company says aim to initially provide on-orbit testing services, after securing spectrum rights for the constellation last February.

The planned constellation comes after Sidus changed its name last year from Craig Technologies Aerospace Solutions, which was created as a manufacturing subsidiary a decade ago for Craig Technologies, a technology solutions provider founded in 1999. Despite going public, Sidus remains majority owned by Craig Technologies, whose CEO Carol Craig continues to effectively control Sidus by retaining voting rights. Click here. (1/7)