Spaceflight Industries has two primary business services: BlackSky Global, their geospatial intelligence service, and LeoStella, a joint venture with Thales Alenia Space to manufacture small satellites.[3]
History
Spaceflight Industries was founded in 2009 as Spaceflight Services by Jason Andrews, with Curt Blake joining soon thereafter as SVP and General Counsel.[4] Prior to founding Spaceflight, Jason Andrews worked at Kistler Aerospace and founded Andrews Space in 1999. Jason Blake has previous experience at Microsoft, Starwave, SpaceDev, and GotVoice.[4]
Spaceflight Services purchased excess capacity from commercial launch vehicles and resold it to a number of "rideshare" secondary payloads, along with providing integration and certification services.[4] By integrating all of the secondary satellites as one discrete unit to the launch vehicle, they were able to provide a significant price discount to reach orbit compared to buying an entire launch vehicle.[5][6]
Blacksky Global was founded in 2013 as an independent company owned by Spaceflight specializing in imaging-as-a-service.[7]
Spaceflight Networks was started in 2014 to provide a network of ground stations for low-latency communication with cubesats and other small satellites.[8][9]
In 2015, Spaceflight Services, Spaceflight Systems (formerly Andrews Space), and Spaceflight Networks, were consolidated under the Spaceflight Industries brand.[10] The same year, Blacksky announced plans for a constellation of 60 satellites that would provide low-cost satellite imagery of any location on Earth within 90 minutes.[11][12]
In March 2018, Spaceflight and Thales Alenia Space announced a joint venture, LeoStella, to build small satellites. LeoStella opened its production facility in February 2019.[3]
In 2020, Spaceflight Industries sold its rideshare business, Spaceflight, Inc. to Mitsui and Yamasa. BlackSky was not part of this deal.[2]
Through a business combination with Osprey Technology Acquisition Corp. (a SPAC), in September 2021 Blacksky became a separate company quoted on the NYSE (ticker: BKSY). The business combination grossed over $280 million in capital to fund Blacksky's growth plan. At the time, BlackSky Global constellation had seven satellites in low Earth orbit; the planned full complement for the constellation was at the time 30 satellites.[13]
BlackSky
BlackSky started out as a subsidiary of Spaceflight Industries as its geospatial intelligence service, to offer on-demand images from a constellation of satellites.[14] Their first satellite, BlackSky Pathfinder-1, was launched on 26 September 2016, and the first pictures were released publicly on 14 November 2016.[15] In late 2018, BlackSky launched BlackSky Global-1 and BlackSky Global-2, two of the company's next generation global satellites, aboard the SSO-A mission. The company was aiming for a 60-satellite constellation, which would offer 1-meter resolution and rapid satellite revisit rates.[16] The satellite constellation was being built by LeoStella LLC, a joint venture between Spaceflight Industries and Thales Alenia Space.[17] BlackSky Global-3 and BlackSky Global-4 satellites were launched aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket in August 2019,[18] and BlackSky Global-7 and BlackSky Global-8 were launched in August 2020 as part of the SXRS-1 rideshare mission.[19] BlackSky Global-9 was launched 22 March 2021 on an Electron Photon but two more on an Electron KS on 15 May 2021 failed.[20] Two further BlackSky satellites were launched and successfully deployed into orbit on April 2, 2022 by Rocket Lab aboard another Electron rocket.[21]
In January 2020, BlackSky received a contract from the U.S. Army to prototype satellites with 50-centimeter resolution. In September 2020, they unveiled their third generation of satellites, scheduled to launch in 2022, that would provide 50-centimeter resolution imagery. They also announced that 16 of the second generation satellites would be launched before phasing in the third-generation units.[22]
