Spaceflight Inc.

Spaceflight Inc. is a private aerospace company that specializes in the launch of secondary payloads ranging from 1 kg up to 300 kg micro satellites from a variety of space launch vehicles, such as Antares, Dnepr, Soyuz, and Falcon 9, as well as from the ISS.^[1]

History

Spaceflight was founded in 2011 by Jason Andrews, with Curt Blake joining soon thereafter as SVP & General Counsel.^[2] Prior to founding Spaceflight, Mr. Andrews worked at Kistler Aerospace and found Andrews Space in 1999. Mr. Blake has previous experience at Microsoft, Starwave, SpaceDev, and GotVoice.^[3] Spaceflight's mission is to fundamentally improve access to space by making launch more routine, more cost effective, and with standard flight interfaces.

Business Model

Spaceflight's typical business model for launch is one satellite to one launch vehicle. With the miniaturization of satellite hardware and improved communication capabilities, satellites have decreased in size and grown more powerful following Moore's Law. Spaceflight buys excess capacity from Commercial Launch Vehicles, sells the capacity to a number of "rideshare" secondary payloads, and integrates all of the secondary satellites as one discrete unit to the launch vehicle, providing a significant price discount to reach orbit compared to buying an entire launch vehicle.^[4][5] Spaceflight is in the process of developing its SHERPA family, a hosted payload and in space transportation solution that will help make launch of secondary payloads more cost effective at to the correct orbit. SHERPA will be able to Hosted Payloads, as well as transport rideshare payloads to the Moon and Mars.^[6][7]

Past and Future Missions

Spaceflight launched its first customers, NASA Ames and Planet Labs, in April 2013 on board Antares Orb-A-One mission and Soyuz 2.1a mission.^[8] Spaceflight has 33 payloads under contract for launch and is slated to launch on the Orb-2 mission in December 2013.

References

External links

• Official website