iRocket And Turion Space Ink
Agreement For 10 Launches To Low Earth Orbit
Nov. 4, 2021
iRocket announced that
the company signed an agreement with Turion Space
Corp in Irvine, CA. Said iRocket CEO Asad Malik, "We
are excited about this new partnership with Turion
Space to provide rapid access to space and cost
competitive launch costs for their 20 Droid
satellites and the low-cost final orbit delivery
option their Droid satellites will bring to some of
our own customers."
iRocket is a New York startup
building 100% fully reusable rockets since 2018 to
cargo micro, nano, cube, and constellations to LEO
orbit on its Shockwave launch vehicle. The company
develops cost-effective launch vehicles that can
support rapid launching within 24 hrs. for 400kg and
1500 kg payloads for satellite constellation
providers for National security satellites, 5G
internet constellations, the Internet of Things
(IoT), Biotech Research, and Space exploration. In
addition, there reusable upper stage will target
space junk removal in LEO orbit. iRocket is
currently funded by the U.S. Space Force – Space
Systems Command, The M&J Engineering Group, &
Village Global a venture capital firm backed by Bill
Gates, Eric Schmidt, Jeffrey Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg,
and Abby Johnson.
Said Turion Space CEO Ryan
Westerdahl, "Turion Space looks forward to a strong
partnership with iRocket for access to space and for
providing us with a pipeline of future customers
that will utilize the final orbit delivery services
our Droid spacecraft can provide."
Turion Space is building
spacecraft to remove orbital-debris and provide
orbit-modification and domain-awareness services to
existing space assets. Solving space debris is a
crucial problem that must be solved to ensure a
sustainable LEO economy and is the first
technological step towards mining Asteroids. Turion
Space plans to launch their D-1 satellite in October
2022. Solving this problem is crucial to ensure a
sustainable space economy and is the first step
towards our longer-term vision of mining Asteroids.
Turion Space is funded by Y Combinator, Soma
Capital, Forward VC, Pi Campus, FoundersX Ventures,
Harvard Management Company, Imagination VC, among
several others.
The two companies also hinted
at possible future collaborations on in-orbit
servicing. Westerdahl suggested that Turion could
work with iRocket to perform final in-orbit
deliveries for a fraction of the launch company's
payload, combined with space junk removal.