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Your Comprehensive Guide to the New Space Economy

G. Pettit here, 

Welcome to the Launchpad Newsletter, your top source for political, economic, and social developments in the New Space Economy, built by real entrepreneurs shaping it.

Ready-for-launch into the insights of the most impactful industry of the 21st Century.

This Week’s Next-Gen Newsflash

🚀 China bets big on its growing commercial sector to complete its upcoming megaconstellation

🛰️ Space nerds rejoice as NASA’s ambitious drone mission to Saturn’s Moon Titan survives sweeping budget cuts at the agency

🇨🇦 Canada’s biggest contribution to the ISS gets a contractual extension into 2030.

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Today’s Subject of Space: Nuclear Propulsion At Long Last?

Lockheed Martin has made headlines for a recent selection by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA to develop and demonstrate nuclear propulsion technology before the end of the decade.

With an unbeatable specific impulse, nuclear engines for rockets have the ability to significantly shorten interplanetary travel. If successfully deployed, their use will likely be remembered as the space industry's version of breaking the sound barrier. A phenomenal technological leap that changes our perspective on physics and human achievement.

And yet nuclear engines have been an industry fantasy since the Cold War, with promising tests and serious research as far back as the 50s, but never reaching full scale production and deployment.

Why is this?

It's easy to ask how technology with such high potential was never realized after all this time. Nuclear rockets are an unfortunate victim of a three front war, having been halted by materials science issues that past generations couldn't overcome, having lost public support through decades of misguided nuclear energy fears, and having gradually lost financial support during the Vietnam war years, like many other space initiatives.

Here's hoping this time around will finally stick.

State of the New Space Economy

• U.S reconnaissance satellite demand surges, with the the Space Force’s research wing, the Space Development Agency, penning 370 satellites on order with a launch of 11 over the next year

• China’s national annual launch rate grows apace in 2024, with a projected total of 100+ by EOY, following a steady trend of 22 in 2016, 55 in 2022, and 67 in 2024

• 2023 brought multiple high-profile market exits of promising space companies, and 2024 will likely stick the trend as high interest rates and reluctant investors squeeze the cost of capital required to compete.

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