WASHINGTON — NorthStar Earth and Space has raised one other $15 million to support its first 4 satellites for tracking objects in orbit, the Canadian company said Dec. 6 because it waits on Rocket Lab to get back to flight so that they can launch on a future mission.
The Series D funding round comes after NorthStar said in January it had amassed nearly $100 million in total for constructing out an area situational awareness (SSA) business.
An initial batch of satellites provided by Spire Global was resulting from launch this summer with Virgin Orbit before the air-launch company fell out of business in April.
NorthStar pivoted to Rocket Lab for a fall launch only to face one other delay following the September failure of the corporate’s Electron rocket to deploy an imaging satellite for Capella Space.
After completing an investigation into the failure, Rocket Lab recently said it expects to return to flight from its launchpad in Latest Zealand no sooner than Dec. 13, with a mission for Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space. (iQPS), a Japan-based Earth imaging company.
NorthStar was second in line to launch before Rocket Lab’s September failure.
Rocket Lab said it plans to share details of the following mission within the queue after launching iQPS. The corporate’s fastest turnaround record thus far between Electron launches is seven days.
Stewart Bain, NorthStar’s CEO, declined to say where its satellites at the moment are in Rocket Lab’s pipeline but said they’re currently being packed at Spire’s facilities in Glasgow, Scotland, to be shipped soon to Latest Zealand.
NorthStar’s latest funding round was supported by Telesystem Space, a family-owned technology fund based in Canada, together with the federal government of Quebec and Luxembourg Future Fund.
The launch contract with Rocket Lab includes two more missions of 4 satellites that NorthStar says can be enough to offer full industrial SSA services, designed to trace objects as small as five centimeters in low Earth orbit and 40 centimeters in geostationary orbit.
The satellites in the primary batch are each the dimensions of 16 cubesats, and NorthStar’s agreement with Spire includes options for as much as 30 spacecraft in total, enabling the SSA platform to trace objects more incessantly.