Spaceflight Industries

History

Spaceflight was founded in 2010 by Jason Andrews, with Curt Blake joining soon thereafter as SVP & General Counsel. Prior to founding Spaceflight, Mr. Andrews worked at Kistler Aerospace and founded Andrews Space in 1999. Mr. Blake has previous experience at Microsoft, Starwave, SpaceDev, and GotVoice. 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

The traditional business model for accessing space 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.

The company also began offering “dedicated rideshare,” a new launch alternative that lowers launch prices for organizations seeking access to space, maximizes utilization of the launch vehicle, and apportions cost based on schedule control and other service features. Lead customers pay for schedule control and other accoutrements of a traditional “primary” customer, but see their price reduced by including rideshare customers on the launch. Likewise, the traditional rideshare customers pay less because lead customers pay a disproportionate amount of the entire launch vehicle cost in order to retain schedule control.

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 to the correct orbit. SHERPA enables more access to space for small spacecraft and hosted payloads, and will be able to transport rideshare payloads to the Moon and Mars.

Past and future missions

Spaceflight launched its first satellites, manifested by NASA Ames Research Center and Planet Labs, on board the Antares A-ONE and Bion-M No.1 missions in April 2013, respectively on the Antares 110 and Soyuz-2.1a launch vehicles. As of January 2017, Spaceflight had delivered 78 payloads over 12 launches, piggybacking on, Antares, Dnepr, PSLV and Soyuz-2 rockets, or on board Cygnus and Dragon spacecraft to the ISS.

In October 2015, Spaceflight Industries booked a launch slot on a Falcon 9 to deliver the 500-kg lunar lander built by SpaceIL for the Google Lunar X-Prize towards the end of 2017. The rocket ride will be shared with a dozen other small payloads ranging from 50 kg to 575 kg.

End of November 2016, Part-Time Scientists signed a launch contract with Spaceflight Industries for the delivery of its lander as a secondary payload on a vehicle yet to be identified, but most likely a SpaceX Falcon 9.