Capella Space Awarded a $15M Contract with the U.S. Air Force

September 16, 2024

Capella Space Corp.,announced its selection for an AFWERX Ventures Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) award by the U.S. Air Force. The funding aims to accelerate private sector innovation to enhance U.S. Air Force capabilities and mission requirements.

Capella Space will receive $15 million in funding to mature, scale and extend its world-leading synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology. The STRATFI investment will accelerate Capella’s innovation roadmap, enabling the development and implementation of its next generation SAR sensor. This new sensor will deliver enhanced resolution, and key features requested by SAR users. New features include lower latency delivery via increased data downlink, and dual-polarization operation.

SAR polarimetry will unlock enhanced feature detection and classification across a wide range of applications, including defense, agriculture, environment, geology, oceanography and disaster response. The development will also reduce latency and further enable mission utility for the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense (DoD) and a wide range of commercial customers.

“As the first American commercial SAR imagery provider, we are excited to continue developing our leading technology to support the U.S. Air Force and its partners,” said Frank Backes, CEO of Capella Space. “This award will further accelerate Capella’s mission to deliver SAR data that is consistently high-quality, timely and reliable.”

This award builds on the strong partnerships Capella Space has developed with other US government agencies including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), U.S. Navy, U.S. Space Force and NASA