🛰️ MANUFACTURING AND OPERATIONS

🇺🇸 🇮🇹 D-Orbit, the European space transportation company, has established a joint venture in the United States to enter the satellite manufacturing business.
D-Orbit announced July 10 the formation of D-Orbit USA, a joint venture between the company and five American co-founders who have worked on satellite programs such as OneWeb, Project Kuiper and Starlink. The venture will combine the expertise of those founders with D-Orbit’s experience with its ION line of orbital transfer vehicles.
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🇺🇸 The Exploration Company has completed a wind tunnel test campaign for its Nyx Earth spacecraft. The company will initially utilize the spacecraft to offer cargo missions to and from space stations in low Earth orbit at a cost of $150 million per flight.
The wind tunnel testing campaign for the Nyx Earth capsule design was conducted with a scale model at the German space agency DLR’s facilities in Cologne. Over a series of sixteen wind tunnel tests, the company explored the vehicle’s performance in the hypersonic regime.
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💰️ FINANCE, FUNDING AND M&A

🇺🇸 Booz Allen Hamilton, the U.S. defense and intelligence contractor, announced July 11 that its corporate venture capital arm, Booz Allen Ventures, has made a strategic investment in Quindar, an early-stage commercial space technology company. 
The investment aims to support Quindar’s platform for automating satellite operations. Satellite owners use Quindar’s app to analyze, test and operate their constellation, and operate their satellite fleet with minimal human intervention. 
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🇺🇸 Armada has raised an extra $40 million through a Microsoft-led funding round to develop mobile data centers tailored for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, the San Francisco-based startup announced July 11.
Microsoft is offering these software tools on its Azure cloud computing marketplace following the investment by its venture capital arm M12. The software includes Armada’s digital platform for managing Starlink terminals and other connected assets such as sensors and drones.
Ultimately, Armada aims to offer ruggedized data centers the size of shipping containers that can connect to services like Starlink for its cloud computing ecosystem called Galleons, which would enable customers to process data faster and more efficiently on-site — known as edge computing.
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🇩🇪 European venture capital firm Alpine Space Ventures closed its first fund with 170 million euros ($185 million) in capital to target space startups. 
The fund is targeting Series A funding rounds of companies in the space sector, primarily in Europe but also in the U.S. and beyond. The fund has a special focus on companies working on the industrialization of the space sector and hardware and software solutions around connectivity and data. 
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🛰️ CORE SERVICES

🇺🇸 Rogue Space Systems Corporation announces it has been selected by SpaceWERX for a SBIR Phase II award, valued over $1M.
This project is focused on enhancing Space Domain Awareness (SDA) through Autonomous Multi-spectral Resident-Space-Object Identification and Characterization (SAMRIC) to ensure the safe and sustainable execution of In-Space Servicing and Manufacturing (ISAM) operations.
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🇺🇸The U.S. Space Force awarded General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems a contract for a second weather satellite.
Under the Space Systems Command contract modification announced July 11, General Atomics will provide three years of operational services for two Electro-Optical Weather System, or EWS, satellites.
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🛰️ PRODUCT, PARTNERSHIPS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

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🚀 LAUNCH CONTRACTS AND MISSIONS

🇺🇸 Starlink Group 9-3 Mision Failure:
The engine on the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 malfunctioned during a launch July 11, causing the potential loss of a batch of Starlink satellites and creating repercussions across the space industry.
The Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:35 p.m. Eastern. The rocket was carrying 20 Starlink satellites, 13 of which with direct-to-cell payloads, on a mission designated Group 9-3 by SpaceX.
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🇨🇳 Hyperbola-1 launch failure
Chinese rocket start-up iSpace has suffered yet another launch failure, resulting in the loss of three satellites as part of a commercial constellation for global weather forecasting and earthquake prediction.
Hyperbola-1, a 24-meter-high solid-fuel rocket produced by iSpace, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in China's Gobi Desert.
The rocket's first three stages flew normally, but the fourth stage failed. Detailed investigations are underway to determine the cause. The mission was crucial for Yunyao Aerospace Technology, which aims to launch nearly 40 satellites this year for its 90-satellite Yunyao-1 constellation by next year.
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🌎️ CUSTOMERS OF THE SPACE INDUSTRY

🇦🇺 🇨🇦ExoSphere, an end-to-end mineral exploration solution, has been deployed by Australian company Fleet Space to advance Barrick Gold's copper exploration at its Reko Diq project in Pakistan.
Powered by advances in space technology, AI, and 3D multiphysics, ExoSphere is being used to generate 3D subsurface maps of local groundwater systems and copper porphyry complexes for multiple zones of interest, comprising over 1,150 square kilometers (≈444 square miles) of the Reko Diq project.
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📜 REGULATORY & GOVERNMENT

🇺🇸 🇳🇿 Dawn Aerospace says it has received approvals from the New Zealand government for a new round of supersonic flight tests of a rocket-powered suborbital spaceplane.
The New Zealand company announced July 11 that the country’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) issued a certificate for its Mark-II Aurora vehicle, allowing it to go to unlimited speeds and altitudes as high as 24,400 meters (80,000 feet.)
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🇮🇱 🇺🇸 The Israel Space Agency has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Texas Association of Business (TAB) to collaborate on space-based initiatives in the future. 
The deal, signed at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev by TAB CEO Glenn Hamer and Israel Space Agency director Uri Oron, will help promote and facilitate business cooperation between Israeli and Texan space companies and organizations
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