Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Happy Halloween folks. Hope you’re having a very spooky day. By the way… We are counting down to TC’s Space event in December! Learn more here. In this issue:
Apex Space, a startup that aims to transform satellite bus manufacturing, emerged from stealth Monday with a $7.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The Los Angeles-based company has set its sights on the satellite bus — the part of the spacecraft that hosts the payload — which it says is the “new bottleneck” hitting the space industry. Apex’s two co-founders, Ian Cinnamon and Maximilian Benassi, said in a blog post that they independently observed core changes to the industry that convinced them that a new satellite bus manufacturing solution was needed.
Cinnamon, a technology startup founder whose company, Synapse Technology, was acquired by Palantir in 2020, said he saw payload customers being “held back” by the long and costly process associated with building custom satellite buses. Benassi, an engineer whose career includes a six-year tenure at SpaceX and nearly a year-and-a-half at Astra, observed changes to launch economics that make mass manufacturing — rather than the bespoke engineering process that’s characterized satellite buses thus far — more sensible.
“Given this transformative change, we must begin to think about spacecraft differently and adapt to the new market conditions,” the pair said. “We cannot just build spacecraft. We must manufacture them at scale.”
Image credit: Apex Space
Image credit: Apex Space
With some 3,000 satellites in orbit, the Starlink constellation is easily the largest in history and of course presents an immense opportunity for global connectivity. But its signals could also be analyzed and used as an alternative to traditional GPS, a new paper claims, with or without SpaceX’s blessing. It would be a public service and wouldn’t cost SpaceX much of anything to implement, but it’s also a valuable service that no business in its right mind (especially one that just committed to a deeply unprofitable connectivity deal in Ukraine) would just implement and provide for free. That said, it may be that the genie is out of the bottle — the data in the paper “illuminates the path” to this use, and someone might find a way to make it work no matter what anyone says.
TC’s Darrell Etherington did a nice roundup of our coverage of Musk’s purchase of Twitter, a months-long saga that came to an abrupt and tumultuous end last week. The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, it’s hard to imagine how Musk will find the time to dedicate to managing the social media site, but he dove in head first by firing top executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal. In the coming weeks, Twitter will delist from the NYSE (ending an approximately nine-year tenure as a public company) and become a private company under Musk’s X Holdings I, Inc.
This is only the beginning. Speculation is running wild, but only time will tell how Twitter will transform under Musk’s formidable leadership.
Elon Musk carries a sink into Twitter HQ. Image Credits: Elon Musk / Twitter
Elon Musk carries a sink into Twitter HQ. Image Credits: Elon Musk / Twitter
Max Q is brought to you by me, Aria Alamalhodaei. If you enjoy reading Max Q, consider forwarding it to a friend.
Source @TechCrunch
