🤠 Howdy team. 56 years ago right now, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise were on the wrong side of the Moon in a crippled spacecraft, a frozen lander turned lifeboat, and a reentry window one day out. They found a way. We got ‘em home.
Most of you reading this may not realize it, but you’ve chosen some version of this assignment in your own lives — by attacking problems that weren’t supposed to have solutions, on timelines that weren’t supposed to be possible.
Fittingly, today's edition skews heavily space with a lot of friends and fellow travelers in Colorado Springs for Space Symposium. Back to greater variety programming next week.
IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:
🚀 Friends in High, Hard Places
🐶 Reader poll: Bring back Pluto?
🗣️ A warning from Japanese OEMs
💰 SBIR is back from the dead
✍ Readers write in re: propulsion
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FRIENDS IN HIGH, HARD PLACES normally lives in the back half of our weekly edition. Not today! We’ve got friends with big news — all of them are literally in high places, so we’re bumping this one up today.
001 / LOW-ORBIT LIGHTHOUSE. Xona Space Systems closed a $170M Series C to launch Pulsar, its private PNT (position, navigation, timing) LEO constellation that delivers up to 100× the signal strength of GPS. The case against higher-orbit nav systems is fairly clear-cut: signals originating from ~20,000 km overhead are bandwidth-constrained, low power, and easy to jam/spoof, making them the first thing to go in a shooting war. We’ve seen it happen in Ukraine, over the Baltics, and across the Middle East. In fact, right as we speak, the most congested maritime corridor on Earth is also the most jammed:
GPS jamming in the Persian Gulf, c/o Sean Gorman
Congrats to the Xona team, and to our own Jeff Crusey, who led their seed round back in 2020. Jeff, on backing them early: “I was drawn to a low-ego, high-horsepower team with a rare clarity about where the world was headed.” And today: “it’s high time for hyper-accurate, ultra-secure navigation signals for national security, autonomy, and to make sure you never miss that left turn again.”
002 / GOING SUPERNOVA. Space maneuver is all the U.S. Space Command wants to talk about right now in Colorado Springs. Great timing for these two:
Portal Space Systems closed a $50M Series A led by Geodesic Capital and our friends Mach33 (++ backing by your boy Crusey, he strikes again!) The $$$ will go to scaling production of Starburst and Supernova, Portal’s two rapidly maneuverable platforms, a new 52,000 sq ft production facility, and GTM with allied customers (including in the Indo-Pacific).
Turion Space pulled in a $75M+ S-B led by Washington Harbour Partners. Turion plans to 5× production capacity for its flight-proven DROID platform, which among other things, carries cameras on a maneuvering bus from LEO to GEO, closes in on other spacecraft, and images them at useful detail. (They’ve won 28 federal contracts to date.)
003 / CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW. HawkEye 360 has filed to go public on the NYSE. The startup operates the largest private constellation for radio-frequency geolocation, finding and tracking emitters (ships, radars, jammers, communication devices) from orbit. And they’ve got a great ticker: $HAWK.
004 / DROP THE DOWNLINK. PA Founding Sponsor Sophia Space ♥ and Kepler Communications are partnering to run orbital datacenter software on LEO birds later this year. As predicted, edge computing for latency-sensitive data will be the first “AI in space” use case to actually happen.
But that doesn’t mean there’s been any slowdown for the “datacenters in space” storyline. Starcloud, which deserves enormous credit for popularizing the concept, recently raised a $170M S-A at $1.1B. Aetherflux is said to be raising on the back of space computing efforts as well. And finally, there’s the big one — the SpaceX IPO in June, expected to raise $75B and finance its push into space-based datacenters — and, we might add, circulate a lot of liquidity back into the hard tech ecosystem.
005 / EDITOR’S PRIVILEGE. Your editor has the pulpit, so he's going to use it: DARPA extended its contract with Array Labs to expand work on new space radar systems.
From the PA team to our friends in space: ad astra per aspera!!
PLUTO, BACK IN PLAY??? 20 years ago this August, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted Pluto out of the planet club, ruling that it had failed to "clear the neighborhood" around its orbit, a technical criterion it misses because it shares Kuiper Belt real estate with other small icy bodies. Your editor, then 11, will never forget the moment he found out Pluto had been stripped of its planet-hood. Seven months earlier, NASA had launched New Horizons — a probe our man Dan had greenlit in his final weeks running the agency.
Nine years later it arrived at a world that wasn’t officially a planet anymore and phoned home with photos of nitrogen glaciers, 3,500-meter mountains, and a heart-shaped region named Tombaugh Regio — for Clyde Tombaugh, the Kansas farm kid whose homemade telescopes landed him a job at Lowell Observatory, where he found Pluto in 1930.
A few things about that 2006 decision have aged poorly:
Most weren’t there/had already flown home! Of the 2,500 astronomers who’d shown up for the IAU confab in Prague, only ~420 stuck around for the final day’s show-of-hands vote that sealed Pluto’s fate — a rounding error against the IAU’s ~9,000 global members.
Was it science or was it politics? Some of the yeas reportedly were a protest vote against perceived U.S. dominance of the IAU — cast in the shadow of the Iraq invasion — with Pluto, an American discovery, being a convenient target. Most Pluto researchers were, and still are, American.
The case never closed… Alan Stern, the New Horizons PI, has called the decision "an embarrassment to astronomy" and never stopped litigating it. Like many others…
FOR THE LAST 20 YEARS, America’s space agency has received a steady stream of letters from schoolchildren around the world pleading Pluto’s case. Last week, one of those letters broke containment:
A letter to NASA from 10-year-old Kaela in Florida (source)
To which Jared Isaacman replied: “Kaela — we are looking into this.” William Shatner has lobbied on Pluto’s behalf, and members of Congress have also taken up the baton. For her part, Kaela has requested free ice cream on the day it goes down.
So, Per Aspera readers… this may be the most consequential poll we’ve ever put before you.
Should Pluto be reinstated?
Unless things change, we will not survive. I want everyone to acknowledge this sense of crisis.
That's Toyota’s CEO speaking to a group of 484 suppliers. And last week, Honda’s honcho had his own choice words after a trip to visit the Chinese EV makers:
“We have no chance against this.”
This may sound sensationalist, but mind you, these are the #1 and #8 largest automakers in the world by volume. They’re not being dramatic…
WHILE WE’RE HERE: The Pentagon has approached American automakers to potentially enlist their capacity for military production, the WSJ reported yesterday.
001 / Y’ALL STREET GOES GLOBAL… Texas opened an office in London this month, exporting the same pitch that’s already raided C-suites in California, Delaware, and New York: no corporate/income tax, fast-track business courts, and multi-$M incentives. Texas has outposts in Mexico, Taiwan, and now the U.K. Meanwhile, Dallas is building a financial district it calls "Y'all Street" (the City of London’s Lord Mayor flew in February to take a look) and the Texas Stock Exchange is set to go live later this year (with British dual-listings openly on the table). After flipping New York in 2022, the Lone Star State is home to the most Fortune 500 HQs in the country. Texas Triangle Economic Supercycle loading…
002 / FAB FIVE… Texas A&M has broken ground on the 80,000-sq-ft, $200M+ semiconductor institute at its RELLIS campus in Bryan. This is the fifth such university fab to open or break ground within the last three years, following:
Arkansas (2023) — 18,660-sq-ft MUSiC facility for SiC power electronics
Wisconsin-Madison (2025) — Ultrawide bandgap MOCVD lab for III-nitride research
Stony Brook (2025) — $20M SiC facility with full operations by next year
Arizona (Feb 2026) — $35.5M expansion of its Nanofabrication Core Facility cleanroom in Tucson (part of the state’s CHIPS-enabled semiconductor cluster)
None of these are anywhere near production volume scale, but that’s beside the point. TSMC Arizona, Samsung Texas, Micron New York, and the rest of a newly fab-pilled America need more engineers and technicians starting yesterday.
003 / AMERICA’S SEED FUND… After the longest shutdown in its 43-year history, the SBIR/STTR program is officially back. POTUS signed S.3971 into law on Sunday, restoring and redesigning the federal government’s primary mechanism for seeding early-stage deep tech & dual-use companies with non-dilutive R&D capital. The reauth comes with three meaningful changes: caps on serial proposers (e.g., SBIR Mills), a new tier with larger awards for later-stage companies with matching capital (with explicit selection weight for technology areas undercapitalized by VC/PE), and finally, tighter DD/security screening across the board. So many of you reading this — hundreds of founders and teams — have used this program; here is a great primer on what’s changed. SBIR is controversial in some dual-use startup and VC circles, but to give our 2¢, the program is underrated.
BONUS ROUND… Amazon says it will acquire Globalstar for ~$11.6B, in a less about the satellites, more about the spectrum deal (like the SpaceX/EchoStar transaction). A good reminder that everything is spectrum — that is, the U.S. is running short on the valuable airwaves modern applications need, and the companies sitting on existing licenses in these bands are holding some of the most valuable real estate in our economy.
We recently published a piece arguing that America proved nuclear propulsion worked sixty years ago, canceled it for no technical reason, and spent five decades refining a chemical technology that was already maxed out.
Two of you wrote back:
Space nuclear power at scale has a few safety problems in micro/low gravity.
Top of the list:
1) Bubble performance for heat removal. Bubbles don't work right in low gravity.
2) Detection of fuel failures / limitation of spreading radiation. Certain proposed coolants/moderators severely limit that safety.
3) 100% Reactor protection during launch => Gravitational response from 0.000001 g to > 4 g and...from "rapid unscheduled disassemblies" as SpaceX would say.
I think nuclear propulsion might finally get beyond paper studies and test stands and break into the mainstream soon. Lot of excitement — and renewed competition — regarding space right now.
ON A RELATED NOTE… NASA recently announced SR-1 Freedom, a nuclear-electric ship bound for Mars targeted for December 2028. And as of yesterday, OSTP Director Michael Kratsios has gone a step further, issuing a directive that calls for a reactor in orbit by 2028 and on the Moon by 2030, and orders agencies to “assign clear accountable leadership for each project and program within the Initiative.”
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