Not-nominal: We lost 2 satellites

The 2 satellites we launched in July are officially unresponsive and today we decided to direct all our team’s energy towards our launch next month and declaring both Landmapper-BC1 and Landmapper-BC2 satellites lost. This ends 6 weeks of trying to resuscitate the satellites, who’s ability to transmit data back to earth was compromised since deployment. This means we’re facing the similar fate of Dauria Aerospace’s two MKA-N satellites, Moscow Aviation Institute’s Iskra-MAI-85, and Moscow State University’s Cosmo Mayak who were all on the Soyuz rocket bay with the suspected anomaly. While our satellites are tested to withstand insane stress on launch the suspected launch anomalies like what was reported by Space News could have generated conditions in excess of what most satellites plan for which, could have fried our key electronics — even systems hardened for the extremes of space.

Before losing contact, our ops team verified functioning subsystems — solar panels, antenna deployment, power system, attitude sensors — so we are moving fast on doing the final testing and assembly for our launch in November. While this loss costs us 4 months of time, we will launch again soon and by the spring be able to be back at planned capacity. Lots of love to the amazing team over the last few weeks trying everything to work around what ultimately is a hardware failure out of their control. We’ve been quoting Elon a lot lately — space is hard.