More than a year ago, Spire Global CEO Peter Platzer began working on a plan to get the company ready to go public. As Spire’s constellation of just over 100 Radio Frequency (RF) data collecting satellites is fully deployed, Platzer’s rationale wasn’t based on CapEx, but to grow trust with customers and ramp up sales. …

BlackSky Holdings owns and operates its own satellites for geospatial imagery collection, but CEO Brian O’Toole sees the company as more of a software company. Its satellite imagery is brought into its Spectra AI platform, which analyzes the imagery and other types of data to deliver insights to customers.  In a recent interview with Via…

New Zealand-based smallsat launcher Rocket Lab made headlines earlier this month when it announced plans to go public through a special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) and set a $4.1 billion valuation on the company. It also shared its plans to build a reusable, medium-lift vehicle called Neutron, with an 8-ton payload capacity. The decision to…

A spree of space startups — Rocket Lab, Spire Global, BlackSky, Momentus, Astra, and AST SpaceMobile — have recently announced plans to go public through Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), a method of financing that has become very popular in recent months. Via Satellite spoke to a number of space investors and analysts to gauge…