TransAstronautica, a startup founded by Joel Sercel, the former Momentus chief technology officer, is raising money for a competing space logistics venture.TransAstra’s business plan starts with transportation for satellites in orbit and extends to refueling rockets with resources harvested from asteroids.“We’re going to build the transcontinental railroad of space,” Sercel, the Southern California startup’s founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “We will make it more affordable to move satellites and payloads from where they are in orbit to where they need to go.”
Must have pretty bad ISP
Interesting regardless, looking forward to how they will resolve this.
Didn't see a dedicated thread for this company.Former Momentus CTO reveals competing space logistics ventureQuote from: SpaceNewsTransAstronautica, a startup founded by Joel Sercel, the former Momentus chief technology officer, is raising money for a competing space logistics venture.TransAstra’s business plan starts with transportation for satellites in orbit and extends to refueling rockets with resources harvested from asteroids.“We’re going to build the transcontinental railroad of space,” Sercel, the Southern California startup’s founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “We will make it more affordable to move satellites and payloads from where they are in orbit to where they need to go.”
TransAstra was founded in 2015 with the goal of mining asteroids. Yet harvesting resources out in the solar system, for all its appeal, is still far from feasible. Moving orbiting spacecraft around earth? That is a service companies are willing to pay for, right now.The trick of space business might be developing a lucrative path to a far-off vision. Elon Musk may want to retire on Mars and SpaceX may enable him to do so, but what’s significant about the firm is that it earns money providing space services in demand right now.TransAstra founder and CEO Joel Sercel will, in theory, perform a similar sleight of hand: When its first spacecraft, dubbed Worker Bee, reaches orbit in 2023, it will show off a novel thruster technology called solar thermal propulsion, and earn money by precisely positioning satellites launched on larger rockets. And if that succeeds, it will launch a fleet of solar-powered spacecraft into orbit—and perhaps realize a larger vision of harvesting commodities from asteroids.
Space logistics startup TransAstronautica announced a partnership Aug. 9 with online astronomy platform Slooh to offer U.S. schools access to a global network of ground-based and space-based telescopes.“We will find moving objects in space with a partnership between education, industry and government,” Joel Sercel, TransAstra founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “For the first time, thousands of amateurs and kids of all stripes will be able to log on to the global network of telescopes that are optimized for finding moving bodies in space.”Under the agreement, TransAstra and Slooh will work together to install TransAstra’s Sutter telescopes at Slooh and TransAstra observation sites around the world.
Trans Astronautica Corp. announced an agreement Sept. 27 with telescope manufacturer Celestron to develop a space-qualified version of the company’s Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph (RASA) ground-based telescope.“We’ve been using Celestron’s RASA telescopes in our space domain awareness and asteroid prospecting systems, and we found them to be very affordable, high-quality optical systems,” Joel Sercel, TransAstra founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “We looked at the designs and we realized it would not be that hard to adapt them for space use.”Over the next year, TransAstra plans to modify the RASA telescope design and substitute materials to produce a telescope that can withstand radiation exposure, temperature swings, and the vibration and shock loads of space launch.