BRISBANE, Australia \u2013 Momentus and Solstar Space announced a three-year agreement Oct. 13 to expand communications, transportation and infrastructure services for government and commercial missions in low-Earth orbit.<\/p>\n
The reciprocal-services agreement is designed to combine \u201cthe respective strengths, products and services of each company to deliver comprehensive low-Earth orbit space capabilities to address a broad range of commercial, government and space-agency requirements,\u201d according to the news release.<\/p>\n
In a joint mission, scheduled for February, the two companies will \u201cdemonstrate real-time, continuous communication with space systems across diverse mission profiles,\u201d Momentus CEO John Rood said in a statement. <\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Momentus and Solstar announced plans to provide customers of the Vigoride space tug with on-demand connectivity<\/a> through Solstar\u2019s Deke Space Communicator. Building on that pact, the companies signed a reciprocal-services agreement with a value as high as $15 million to combine Solstar\u2019s communications expertise with Momentus products and services related to launch, logistics, payload deployment and on-orbit services.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are pleased to deepen our partnership with Solstar Space as we continue to scale our in-space servicing capabilities,\u201d Rood said. \u201cThis collaboration gives Momentus key advantages to provide resilient spacecraft-to-spacecraft operations including refueling and repair, on-orbit inspection and reliable data-relay capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n Outdated Communications<\/p>\n Ongoing communications among spacecraft is particularly important for demanding jobs like intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance; in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing; and rendezvous, proximity operations and docking. \u201cThese missions cannot operate reliably and securely without persistent space-based communications,\u201d Solstar CEO and founder Brian Barnett said in a statement.<\/p>\n Solstar specializes in intersatellite data relay<\/a>, space-to-ground communications and space-based Wi-Fi<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cOutdated space comms approaches, originating in the 1960s, oftentimes leave space assets disconnected,\u201d Barnett said. \u201cSolstar is filling those space-communications gaps just as Momentus is filling gaps for spacecraft and payload deployment and in-space servicing. Together we are removing roadblocks to advancing space operations.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BRISBANE, Australia \u2013 Momentus and Solstar Space announced a three-year agreement Oct. 13 to expand communications, transportation and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76046,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[55174,111,139,69,26147,147,2303,59392,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-76045","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-momentus","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-satellite-communications","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-sn","15":"tag-solstar","16":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}