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The Space & Defense Update is LIVE from the @NYSE
@itsmoislam and @JackKuhr are joined today by:
– @Gedmark, CEO of @Astranis
– @ConnorLoveCA, General Partner at @a16z
– @daynagrayson, Co-Founder of @constructcap
– @e_h_obrien, Managing Editor of @tectonicdefense
We're digging into:
– Astranis' $468M credit facility from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and how it ramps domestic satellite production and launches.
– a16z's American Dynamism push, and where the firm sees the biggest opportunities in defense, manufacturing, and the industrial base.
– Why Construct Capital is investing in foundational industries, and what it takes to rebuild them.
– Lessons from a week in Kyiv, and what Ukraine's front lines are teaching defense tech.
Comment if you love space and defense (help us share the show!) 👇
nitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1oKMvNolz…
.@Argotec_Space, an Italian smallsat manufacturer, has raised €50M ($55.8M) to ramp up how many satellites it can build each year.
Since its founding in 2008, Argotec has already built up some flight heritage, including two microsatellites that flew with the NASA DART and Artemis I missions. The company focuses on building small sats up to 350kg.
Payload editor @jacqfeldscher shares what the company plans to do with the new capital. Link in the comments.
Payload 🚀 retweeted
a16z's @ConnorLoveCA on his thesis behind manufacturing as an asset class.
“I think in the end, you won’t vertically integrate everything."
"And so, in order to produce at the thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of systems, you also need to redefine that supply tier in the middle.”
“And I think the opportunity that exists, both from an investment perspective and almost as a prerequisite for the systems companies to be successful at scale, is that you need this middle layer of companies re-engineering and redefining everything."
"From the actual material that comes out of the ground, to the actuator, the switch, the part, and then the subassembly and the system that makes all these things touch each other.”
“We in Silicon Valley have been very much focused on these top systems companies. Now we need to go back and figure out how to actually enable that at scale."
With @itsmoislam at the @NYSE
Announcements in the European space sector this week signaled that the region is getting ready to go on the offensive in space.
💸 The European Defence Fund tapped French OTV startup OSMOS X to lead a study on how to respond to threats on orbit.
🪖 UK-based orbital security startup SHIELD SPACE launched a coalition of UK space companies to pitch the UK MoD on a space-based carrier-strike platform.
🛰️ Astroscale UK won a £15M (€18M) contract from the UK MoD to act as the prime contractor for a new, secretive in-space defense program, called LEDA.
📝 And Blackswan Space, the Lithuanian company that recently announced its RPO Kit product, published an open letter (originally sent in September) to the UK Parliament calling for greater funding of space control capabilities.
For this week's edition of Payload Europe, reporter @Douglas__Gorman spoke with officials at all four companies to hear where these projects are headed, and why Europe is all of the sudden happy to talk about offensive capabilities in orbit. Link below.
Payload 🚀 retweeted
Construct Capital's @daynagrayson on raising a fund for heavy industries in 2020, at a time when everyone was hyper-focused on software investing.
“The venture world was one that was honed and trained on SaaS."
"Everyone knew what a magic number should look like, what the Rule of 40 is and when it should be attained.”
“We had a fundamental belief that when venture reaches a point where associates take your deck and plug and chug the numbers and then give you an answer, it might not be venture anymore.”
With @itsmoislam at the @NYSE
Payload 🚀 retweeted
Astranis CEO @Gedmark on why AI-driven cyberattacks will push a chunk of government/enterprise activity off the public internet and onto siloed satellite networks.
“Where that ultimately leads, I think, is a larger desire to take entire pieces of infrastructure off the internet completely, and have countries and enterprises have more siloed networks: completely standalone networks, air-gapped from the public internet.”
With @itsmoislam at the @NYSE
The cyber incidents of the last 48 hours have been pretty mind blowing. I’ve been trying to piece together the “why now” question, and I think what we’re seeing is the first of a new kind of super-agent driven vulnerability cascade-- first one vulnerability is found by a malicious actor, then other bad actors pop up to try and take advantage of it before companies patch their systems.
But because each bad actor is using swarms of thousands of super-agents, those agents are not only exploiting the existing vulnerability, but finding new zero days as well, all in a matter of hours. And the cycle repeats. As of the writing of this post there have been vulnerabilities found across at least half-dozen independent systems including LiteLLM, PHP, eMudhra Certificates, NGINX, Bind 9, and NodeJS. The list continues to grow hour by hour.
Basically everything connected to the internet is at risk. Not just company websites and the usual databases of sensitive personal information, but all our critical infrastructure-- banks, power grids, pipelines, government agencies, all of it.
The good news is that cybersecurity and ops teams had a chance to see this coming. This is why from when Mythos first dropped and had our first warning, these teams have been hard at work shoring up systems across the board.
This is also why at Astranis we’ve seen a massive uptick in demand for truly air-gapped, sovereign networks, deployed via dedicated satellite to span an entire country or connect a large enterprise.
It is in fact possible to take an entire category of critical infrastructure off the internet entirely. With a fully self-contained network where all the endpoints are off grid. This is not a new concept-- anyone could do this for your home today with equipment you can buy from Best Buy. But to stand up such a network covering a large geographic area or an entire country, without touching the existing fiber or other network infrastructure, you can only do that with a dedicated satellite. And specifically a satellite in a special orbit called geosynchronous orbit.
Over the past year we’ve begun working with some of our customers on what it will take to implement truly air-gapped, standalone networks in support of mission critical use cases like core government functions, emergency response, defense, core infrastructure, or all of the above.
That might sound extreme, but that is the kind of measure we expect will be required to shrink the attack surface of some of the world’s most critical infra. That’s just the position we are now in. It's a brave new world.
Thinking of going back to school? @seraphim_space is taking applications.
The space-focused venture capital firm today announced the launch of the Seraphim Academy, a new program for early-stage space startups offering courses in fundraising, scaling, and operations. The program comes with up to a year of support, and $150,000 of investment for each company that takes part.
Read more about how what the academy is looking for, from Payload reporter @Douglas__Gorman . Link below.
NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Agriculture signed an agreement on Saturday to cooperate on EO and geospatial analytics to improve the data available to American farmers.
The agreement will deepen the agencies’ existing partnership in multiple areas, including:
🛰️ Working together on remote sensing science;
📈 Improving geospatial data integration;
🌽 Ensuring NASA work aligns with agriculture needs;
🌩️ Better monitoring of everything from crops, to droughts, to natural disasters.
Read the full breakdown of the partnership in this week's Polaris, written by Payload editor @jacqfeldscher. Link below.
Shield Space, the UK-based orbital security startup developing autonomous guidance systems and space-control capabilities, launched a new coalition today in an attempt to give UK and NATO forces a commercially led defense force in orbit.
The UK Space Superiority Coalition brings together space companies across the UK—including AstroAnalytica, Goonhilly, Magdrive, Mutable Tactics, Optera, Third Planet Orbital, and others—in an effort to build a space-based carrier strike force to give western militaries more options to respond to threats on orbit.
Just weeks after Russia got up-close-and-personal with an ICEYE sat, the timing couldn't be better. Read more details from Payload reporter @Douglas__Gorman . Link below.
Rendezvous Robotics (@rdvrobotics), the CO-based startup developing self-assembling spacecraft, announced $20M in fresh funding today to support an in-space demo launching NET April 2028.
Across the industry, satellite manufacturers are developing sats that require football-field-sized solar arrays and large-aperture antennas—neither of which fit comfortably inside available rocket fairings.
For many, the solution to this size mismatch looks like origami. But Rendezvous Robotics is taking a different approach—developing technology to allow future satellites to launch in pieces that can self-assemble in space.
Read more about the company's long-term plans, from Payload reporter @Douglas__Gorman. Link below.
Payload 🚀 retweeted
a16z's @ConnorLoveCA says if you apply tech to the industries that built America, you can build some of the world’s most valuable companies.
“For the last 20 years, companies like Boeing and Rio Tinto and ExxonMobil have been inherently really important to the fabric of America."
"They kept us warm, they get us across the country, they kept us safe in a war. But those have not been the most valuable companies.”
“Now, when you look at the market, go look at the NYSE tickers behind you, they’re technology companies.”
“And so when you apply technology to the areas that are just so important for the fabric of America, you’re going to have both these really important companies to the world and the most valuable companies of the world."
"And that’s the investable opportunity today.”
With @itsmoislam at the @NYSE
And another one!
SPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT:
Marshall Smith, CEO of @Starlab_Space will be joining the Space & Defense Investor Summit.
Starlab is an ISS-class station designed to reach orbit fully outfitted on a single Starship launch, backed and supported by @voyagertech_, Airbus, Mitsubishi, MDA Space and Palantir.
📍 The Beverly Hilton
🗓️ November 3 - 4, 2026
Another one!
SPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT:
Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of @Axiom_Space will be joining the Space & Defense Investor Summit.
Axiom is building its station by docking its first modules to the ISS, then detaching them to fly free before the ISS retires in 2030. The company’s latest round topped $525 million.
📍 The Beverly Hilton
🗓️ November 3 - 4, 2026
The Europeans are gearing up for a fight in orbit.
This week, the European Defence Fund tapped French OTV startup OSMOS X to lead a coalition studying how countries can respond to threats in orbit. The 30-month study is backed by ~€4.5M ($5M).
The coalition brings together seven organizations across Europe, including France’s ArcSpace and CNRS; Germany’s KINETIK Space; Poznan University of Technology in Poland; and Politecnico di Milano in Italy.
The goal is to create a spacecraft that is capable of approaching, capturing, and even manipulating adversarial spacecraft with in-space welding, to deal with the immediate threat without causing debris.
Payload reporter @Douglas__Gorman spoke with OSMOS X CEO Arnaud Masson about what the moment means for Europe. Link below.
