Blue Origin has successfully completed its NS-25 mission, resuming crewed flights for the first time in nearly two years. The mission brought six tourist crew members to the edge of space, including artist and former Air Force Captain Ed Dwight. In 1961, Dwight was selected by President John F. Kennedy to be the country’s first […]
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Starfish Space’s ambitious first mission to demonstrate on-orbit rendezvous and docking tech has officially come to a close, with the startup managing to complete some of the objectives thanks to a little help from an unexpected partner: space logistics company D-Orbit. Starfish launched its first spacecraft, called Otter Pup, nearly a year ago with ambitious […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Boeing’s Starliner launch tonight has been postponed “out of an abundance of caution” scarcely two hours before the historic liftoff. The scrub is reportedly due to an issue with the oxygen relief valve on the Atlas V rocket’s upper stage.
There are backup launch opportunities on May 7, 10 and 11. After years of delays and over $1 billion in cost overruns, the mission is set to be Boeing’s first attempt to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.
Once the issue is resolved with the upper stage, the United Launch Alliance Atlas V will carry the CST-100 Starliner capsule to orbit along with the two onboard astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams — from Florida’s Cape Canaveral at 10:34 PM local time Monday evening. The mission also marks the first time ULA’s Atlas will carry crew. The rocket boasts a success rate of 100% across 99 missions. (ULA is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.)
The astronauts would now dock at the station at the earliest on Thursday, where they would remain for at least eight days. The two astronauts will return to Earth in the capsule no earlier than May 16.
If all goes to plan, Boeing will be able to finally certify its Starliner for human transportation and begin fulfilling the terms of its $4.2 billion NASA astronaut taxi contract. That contract, under the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, was awarded in 2014. Elon Musk’s SpaceX was also granted a contract under that program, for its Crew Dragon capsule, and has been transporting astronauts to and from the ISS since 2020.
While SpaceX has soared in its human transportation services, flying over a dozen crewed missions and also racking up private flights with Axiom Space and billionaire Jared Isaacman, Boeing has fallen sharply behind. The aerospace giant originally attempted an uncrewed mission to the ISS in 2019, though that failed due to technical issues; further problems delayed the next attempt, until it was finally accomplished in 2022.
As of last year, Boeing had rung up $1.5 billion in charges due to the long-delayed Starliner program.
But despite the technical snags, both NASA and Boeing have stressed their commitment to the mission, and to the safety of the two astronauts.
“The lives of our crew members, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are at stake,” NASA’s associate administrator Jim Free said in a press conference late last month. “We don’t take that lightly at all.”
Indeed, for NASA a successful mission bring the agency one step closer to having two operational transportation providers, bringing critical redundancy to the Commercial Crew program. Per Boeing’s contract, it is on the line for six astronaut missions.
Musk took to X, the social media platform he also owns, to comment on the mission, noting that “although Boeing got $4.2 billion to develop an astronaut capsule and SpaceX only got $2.6 billion, SpaceX finished 4 years sooner.”
Mars exploration has been always been the exclusive purview of national space agencies, but NASA is trying to change that, awarding a dozen research tasks to private companies as a prelude to commercial support for future missions to the Red Planet.
It’s the second time in a month that the agency has shown its desire for commercial support in Mars missions, having more or less scrapped the original Mars Sample Return mission in favor of a to-be-determined alternative likely by private space companies.
A total of nine companies were selected to perform twelve “concept studies” on how they could provide Mars-related services, from payload delivery to planetary imaging to communications relays. While each award is relatively small — between $200,000 and $300,000 — these studies are an important first step for NASA to better understand the costs, risks, and feasibility of commercial technologies.
The companies selected are: Lockheed Martin, Impulse Space, and Firefly Aerospace for small payload delivery and hosting services; United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic for large payload delivery and hosting services; Albedo, Redwire Space, and Astrobotic for Mars surface-imaging services; and SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and Blue Origin for next-gen relay series.
Nearly all the selected proposals would adapt existing projects focused on the moon and Earth, NASA said in a statement. The twelve-week studies will conclude in August, and there’s no guarantee that they would lead to future requests for proposals or contracts. That said, it’s similarly unlikely that future contracts would appear without a study having previously been done by a company vying for it.
The companies were sourced from a request for proposals put out by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory earlier this year. According to that solicitation, the idea is to develop a new paradigm for Mars exploration, one that delivers “more frequent lower cost missions” via partnerships between government and industry.
The plan is similar to the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which provides large contracts to private companies to deliver payloads to the moon. And like CLPS, which helped bankroll the first successful private lunar lander (among others), these latest awards also show that the agency is increasingly comfortable working with smaller, earlier-stage startups working on unproven tech.
True Anomaly’s first mission didn’t go as planned by any stretch of the imagination, but the space and defense startup’s CEO, Even Rogers, said he doesn’t consider it a failure. Providing new details on what went right and wrong, he explained how they’re turning this anomaly into a “success story.”
Though the company has yet to assign an ultimate cause for the issues that ended the mission, a timeline of events offers insight into how an in-space startup reacts to an anomaly in progress.
The company launched its first two satellites on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 rideshare mission on March 4. The two spacecraft, which the company calls Jackals, are designed to maneuver closely to other objects, capturing high-resolution images and video of them using optical and radar sensors. The aim of this first mission, Mission X, was to demonstrate these capabilities on orbit for the first time.
The two spacecraft deployed as expected from the rocket, but the company started encountering problems that same day: Mission controllers expected to communicate with each spacecraft within three hours of deployment, but they didn’t see any signal from the first spacecraft, designated Jackal 2, and had only a partially successful first contact with Jackal 1.
The telemetry package they received from Jackal 1 was positive: The spacecraft’s arrays were receiving voltage, and the data showed that it was correctly positioned in relation to the sun. However, mission controllers were unable to uplink data, and subsequent overnight contact attempts for both vehicles failed.
It was a sign of what was to come. But Rogers is adamant that it would be a mistake to call the mission a failure.
“The Mission X approach is, get something up there as quickly as possible with the right level of complexity that we could learn from and then go from there,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “The mentality we take is, we fell short of our objectives, but we’re not looking at this as a flight test failure — in the same way that when SpaceX blows up a rocket, everybody cheers.
“It’s only a failure if you don’t learn — it’s only a failure if you didn’t give 100% and you don’t take responsibility for the design as it is, and the change of the design to improve it.”
The following day, True Anomaly engineers engaged with other rideshare passengers and external space domain awareness providers to ensure they were tracking the correct satellites.
This is more difficult than it sounds: In rideshare missions, where dozens of passenger spacecraft are deployed in very quick succession, it can be surprisingly difficult to actually establish which satellites belong to whom. Communications networks, like high-latitude ground stations and ViaSat’s geostationary satellites, also become congested as the operators make a rush on their services.
The company received pictures of Jackal 2 from an unnamed non-Earth imagery provider on March 7, which confirmed that it had also deployed its solar panels and correctly oriented itself; pictures of Jackal 1 came the following day. Mission controllers stood up an additional ground station integration on March 9, and finally, six days after launch, confirmed the orbit states of both satellites. But Jackal 2 stayed silent, and they were unable to establish further contact with Jackal 1.
Engineers continued working; throughout the mission, they added capabilities to the in-house command and control software platform Mosaic and continued sending commands to the two Jackals. Ultimately, the company announced on March 21, the team was unable to verify if either Jackal was still functional, or any information whatsoever about their state.
Root cause analyses can take some time, but this is especially the case when you don’t have a lot of data to work with, explained Rogers.
“What we know for sure is that the spacecraft was, when we received the latest batch of information about its status, the spacecraft’s solar panels were deployed, and it was pointing towards the sun,” he said. “The startup sequence behaved at least partially nominally… We just weren’t able to communicate.”
That said, he expressed confidence that it was not simply a radio problem, but “probably upstream of comms.”
There were a lot of eyes on True Anomaly’s first mission. The company has generated a lot of buzz since it emerged from stealth a year ago with ambitious plans to build intelligence-gathering pursuit satellites to bolster national security and defend American assets from adversaries on orbit. True Anomaly closed a $100 million Series B round last year to accelerate those plans.
True Anomaly’s four co-founders named the blog post announcing the results of the mission “Fly, Fix, Fly,” which is a direct reference to the company’s focus on rapid design cycles. With that in mind, engineers are introducing a number of modifications to both Jackal and Mosaic prior to the second mission — but some were going to be introduced regardless of the outcome of Mission X.
One of the most significant changes is to the satellite design: The next Jackals will be 100 pounds lighter, a design modification that improves maneuverability and boosts payload capacity. The company is also upgrading the satellite’s power architecture and improving ground test infrastructure. They’re also changing how the flight software weighs multiple “out-of-limit inputs” — signals that something is wrong — relative to each other.
By all accounts, the outcome of Mission X has not slowed the company down whatsoever: True Anomaly is planning on flying at least twice more in the next 12 months.
“The success story of Jackal Mission X is twofold,” Rogers said. “The first is, a variety of partners and other members of the Transporter-10 mission coming together to all help each other. The second is, our team reacted very quickly and iterated very quickly.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has pronounced the agency’s $11 billion, 15-year mission to collect and return samples from Mars: insufficient. But the strategy shift could be a huge boon to space startups, to which much of that planned funding will almost certainly be redirected.
“The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away,” Nelson said at a press conference. “We need to look outside the box to find a way ahead that is both affordable and returns samples in a reasonable timeframe.”
In other words, clear the decks and start over — with commercial providers on board from the get-go.
The Mars Sample Return mission was still in the planning stages, but an independent review of the project last year found that, given budget, technology and other constraints, the mission was unlikely to complete before 2040, and at a cost of $8 billion 11 billion. (And like goldfish, projects like these tend to grow to the maximum budget projected.)
Though NASA proposed a revised plan in the mold of the original, it has now also challenged the space community to go further: “NASA soon will solicit architecture proposals from industry that could return samples in the 2030s, and lowers cost, risk, and mission complexity.”
Considering how heavily both primes and space startups have been investing in interplanetary capability, this announcement arguably amounts to a historic windfall. A company like Intuitive Machines, riding high after accomplishing the first private lunar landing, will almost certainly be firing on all cylinders to take on what could be a multi-billion-dollar contract.
Even if NASA wants to assign only half or even a quarter of the original budget to an endeavor led by a commercial space company, private industry has already shown that it can do more with less when compared to legacy outfits.
It’s also catnip for launch companies, since the time horizon is far enough out that heavy launch vehicles like Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron and, of course, SpaceX’s Starship may be cleared to fly when the mission is ready to progress. That was no doubt also the plan with the 2040 timeline, but “2030s” (the notional new one) is a lot closer to the present, and a hamburger today is worth 10 in a decade.
Between the lines can be seen the admission that any mission planned before the present bloom of orbital and interplanetary capability is, very simply, no longer feasible. Although NASA’s troubled Space Launch System heavy launch vehicle is perhaps the largest such project, to abandon it now would be to throw away a great deal, while preemptively opting for a leaner Mars program fueled by commercial ambitions seems to have no obvious downside. (There’s plenty of time to save and repurpose the most important concepts and research already done by NASA and its partners.)
No doubt that many of the companies this decision stands to benefit — not just startups and growing space companies but also primes and launch providers — saw the writing on the wall and have been looking forward to this day. But the official announcement, and the implication that it is the new generation of space companies that will accomplish ambitious goals like a there-and-back trip to Mars, must be very validating.
To be clear, there is no money on the table just yet — but the promise has essentially been made that what would have belonged to the Mars Sample Return mission will be repurposed according to whatever new plan the expansive “NASA community” decides on. Whatever that new plan may be, it will almost certainly rely far more than before on commercial services and hardware.
Just as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services accelerated and incentivized the proliferation of vehicles, spacecraft and landers we see today — including some by companies that didn’t exist a few years ago — the newly recast Mars Sample Return mission may have fired the starting gun on commercial ambitions for the red planet.
Rocket Lab and True Anomaly will attempt to deliver and operate space hardware for the military under intentionally tight time frames, as part of the Space Force’s push to solicit “tactically responsive” space capabilities from commercial companies.
Each company will design and build a satellite capable of rendezvousing with other spacecraft in orbit at close proximity, as well as command and control centers for the mission. As part of Rocket Lab’s $32 million contract, it will also launch the satellite with its Electron rocket. True Anomaly will partner with an unnamed “trusted commercial launch provider” for its ride under its own $30 million contract, according to a statement.
Notably, True Anomaly said it would also “leverage $30 million of internal private capital” for the mission, so it will spend a combined $60 million to stand up its Jackal for this contract.
The target for spacecraft delivery under the contract, called Victus Haze, is fall 2025. Once the spacecraft have been built, the two companies will enter successive phases, including a “hot standby” phase where they must essentially remain ready to respond to the Department of Defense’s notice to manifest the satellite and launch. Once in orbit, Rocket Lab and True Anomaly must rapidly commission and ready their spacecraft for operations — with each other.
If all goes to plan, Rocket Lab’s Pioneer satellite will conduct the so-called rendezvous and proximity operations with True Anomaly’s Jackal spacecraft.
The new contracts are similar to those awarded to Firefly and Millennium Space in 2022, which saw Millennium deliver the satellite for launch by Firefly. That mission, called Victus Nox, was executed last September. Under that mission, the two companies had to integrate the payload and ready the rocket in less than 58 hours; then, Firefly was given just 24 hours to launch.
While exact timelines for the Victus Haze mission were not disclosed by either Rocket Lab or True Anomaly, the former company did say in a statement that the mission “will improve … processes and timelines.”
The new mission also includes a handful of additional, ambitious requirements, like on-orbit spacecraft maneuvering, which is meant to simulate a real-life rendezvous with an adversary satellite.
“We recognize the significant opportunity to leverage the commercial space industry’s innovations to counter China as America’s pacing threat,” Space Systems Command program executive officer Col. Bryon McClain said in a statement. “The United States has the most innovative space industry in the world. Victus Haze will demonstrate, under operationally realistic conditions, our ability to respond to irresponsible behavior on orbit.”
Since Bumble’s blockbuster IPO at the height of the pandemic, investors’ ardor with the dating service has cooled. Bumble’s shares trade at roughly $11 per share right now, a far cry from the $76 they closed at on its first day as a public company in February 2021.
Of course, investors are fickle, which is a challenge for nearly every publicly traded company. The bigger concern for Bumble is user fatigue. People aren’t downloading dating apps as enthusiastically as they once were, which means less subscription revenue. Younger people in particular are gravitating to other platforms to find love, including TikTok, Snapchat and even Discord.
Now, it’s Lidiane Jones’ job to reverse these trends. It’s a tall order, one faced by numerous CEOs who’ve been tasked with rescuing outfits from their post-pandemic doldrums: in publishing, in retail and in the automotive industry, among other sectors. The outcome is far from certain, of course. But Jones, who was recruited to Bumble in January from Slack — where she was also hired as a turnaround CEO and left after just 10 months — has a game plan, as she explained recently over the din of lunchtime diners at a San Francisco restaurant.
Part of the plan ties to AI, which Bumble’s rivals are also leaning into more heavily. Part of it ties to “margin expansion.” A big part of it, Jones told me, is simply restoring joy to an experience that is no longer fun for nearly half of the participants. Much of our conversation follows, edited for length and clarity.
Like a lot of CEOs right now, you walked into a situation where, almost immediately, you had to lay off people — in Bumble’s case, 30% of a staff of 1,200. That’s a lot to figure out fast. How did you manage it?
I had a bit of onboarding that was going on before I even started. [Bumble founder] Whitney [Wolfe Herd] was incredibly engaged in my onboarding, which gave me an accelerated path to learning the organization. She’s been really supportive. I think that made a huge difference. I’m also a strong believer that if you’re going to do a transformation, be really thorough and do it thoughtfully, so that you’re not putting the company through a lengthy multi-phase process.
You are relaunching the Bumble app in the second quarter of this year. I read that you are reconsidering having women make the first move, which seems like a big shift.
Our brand awareness is so high, it’s amazing. And if you ask anybody about Bumble, they’ll say it’s about women, and the core of that is not changing. We are a company that really cares about women’s empowerment.
But as we approach our 10-year anniversary, it’s a great moment to think about how we best serve our mission. For us, it’s really about how we express women’s empowerment today and for the next 10 years. What we really want is to go from women making the first move to women deciding [who should make the first move]. We’re giving women more control and flexibility based on what works for them.
Do you think that by inviting women to make the first move, Bumble had an impact on who uses the platform? Friends have told me the men they’ve met on the platform tend to be more passive, sometimes to their consternation.
Historically, what we’ve seen is that a lot of the men who come to Bumble believe in women being empowered. I’ve heard that feedback about passive [men] a few times, but not as much. Certainly, our ultimate goal is to ensure that our customers have a great experience.
Other areas of focus for you are security and AI. What can Bumble’s users expect to see with this relaunch?
If you think about the advancement of this incredible technology in the context of dating, it’s only as good and as safe as a company’s data and safety practices. Our customers’ privacy and their trust has always been incredibly strong; we’ve always had a high bar for healthy connections.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve developed a lot of AI and technology that safeguards behavior in the app, and we can tune the models to reflect our values and safety guidelines. But we want to take it even further. A huge part of Bumble’s DNA is advocating for policies that will ensure women feel safe, and we want to be at the forefront of not only driving great technology development, but also policy advocacy for safety online.
Bumble has long run physical verifications of its users to ensure user profiles aren’t bots or scams, but it does not conduct criminal background checks. Is that changing with the help of AI?
Background checks are one that we are exploring. It’s one that we certainly will partner with different [players]. But it is a priority for me. I think it’s an important next step for us.
What else should people know about the coming update?
It is the beginning of a new pace of innovation for Bumble. It’s the start of a new set of experiences. We are updating the profile experience; we’re updating the visual language of the app; we want to feel more connected to our users, and for the tone of voice to be fun and joyful. We’re looking at AI to help augment some of the inflection points in people’s lives that are particularly anxiety provoking, like the profile creation, which can be really challenging. We really want dating to be fun again — that’s the key of it.
User fatigue is a lot to combat. Is there a new user acquisition strategy to accompany the new app?
Bumble has always been great at community-based marketing: hosting events and finding ambassadors who really want to represent the brand. That got a little disrupted during the pandemic; we’re using this moment ahead of our launch to reignite a lot of community-based events, because there are a lot of people who are excited to reconnect in person, and that’s the starting point.
Bumble has always been about more than dating, too. Dating is a huge part of it, but we’ve always believed that there is a need for connection and friendships. So we’re expanding our investments in our friendship capability, because we believe that a lot of people want to just start by hanging out with other people. From a friendship perspective, when it comes to local and safe in-person events, there are tons of opportunities there and unmet need.
Bumble for Friends launched last year. Would we ever see you spin this out as a standalone entity?
We’re still gathering customer feedback. I’ve heard passionate cases for both. We’re still exploring that one.
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