Elon Musk’s SpaceX Raising Money At A Valuation Approaching $10B

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), the commercial space transportation startup founded by Elon Musk with ambitions to land people on Mars, is said to be raising investment that values the company somewhere south of $10 billion.

SpaceX has responded sayng: “SpaceX is not currently raising any funding nor has any external valuation of the magnitude you reported been done.”

SpaceX continues to make advances with its own spacecraft and rack up more agreements for future commercial and government launches.

The company also faces stiffer competition from other commercial firms that are looking to compete more aggressively in the new space race.

The latest capital infusion includes a large secondary investment, which appears to be somewhere in the region of $200 million.

This confirms some of the details published in April this year by Quartz, which cited a source reporting that the company might be raising between $50 million and $200 million.

According to CrunchBase, SpaceX has raised $245.5 million in private backing, with the last round disclosed in December 2012.

In its first 10 years of operation, SpaceX generated $4 billion in contracts (that includes funding from NASA between $400 million and $500 million).

The manifest for upcoming launches lists just under 40 missions planned between now and 2018.

For satellite operators looking for launch vessels, part of the attraction of SpaceX has to do with price.

Launches currently cost under $60 million for a low-Earth orbit launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 craft.

But it is working on more efficient technology for the rockets, including reusability, with some success already with return landings.

If successful, the projection is that a launch could cost as little as between $5 million and $7 million.

In tandem, SpaceX is also pursuing its Mars ambitions. One big step on that trajectory is the development of spacecraft capable of carrying humans and cargo.

Manned test missions involving the Falcon Heavy and the Dragon are planned in the next two to three years.

UK Lord Dyson invests £5m in AI Robotic Vision lab

Lord James Dyson considers himself a UK evangelist for engineering.

Dyson, the engineering company best known for its bagless vacuum cleaners, is to invest £5m in a Robotics Vision lab at Imperial College, London.

The research will focus on vision systems that can help robots understand and adapt to the world around them, the company said.

Below is a video of one of their projects SLAM++.


Dyson has been working on robotics with Imperial's Prof Andrew Davison since 2005, and he will run the new lab.

The research will cover domestic robots as well as his speciality, robotic vacuum cleaners.

James Dyson said: "My generation believed the world would be overrun by robots by the year 2014. We now have the mechanical and electronic capabilities, but robots still lack understanding - seeing and thinking in the way we do.

"Mastering this will make our lives easier and lead to previously unthinkable technologies."

Dyson's prototype DC06 robotic cleaner never made it to market 

Although the UK may believe it's a pioneer in this field, a number of other small robotic vacuum cleaners, such as LG's Hom-Bot and iRobot's Roomba, have come on to the market and are achieving great success.

iRobot also has a long-standing history with AI robotics for the military and enforcement authorities.

The five-year investment, supplemented by an additional £3m of match-funding from other sources, will pay for 15 scientists, including some of Dyson's own engineers, the company said.

Prof Davison, currently head of robot vision at Imperial's department of computing, is a collaborative team member for the Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM++) systems. (see the video above).

The innovative group's work on SLAM++ is led by Renato Salas-Moreno.

Davison says: "A truly intelligent domestic robot needs to complete complex everyday tasks while adapting to a constantly changing environment.

"We will research and develop systems that allow machines to both understand and perceive their surroundings - using vision to achieve it."

UK engineering and robotic innovative projects are still bogged down in wrangles over meagre budgets, nepotism, cronyism, administrative hurdles and stifling red tape, resulting in mediocre products that are a mere shadow imprint of their original concepts.

Academic institutes fight each other over the financial scraps thrown to them by a UK government focussed only on boosting the enormous profits of the financial institutes to which they are connected.

Let's wish this project one more success, given that it is fronted my a real live English Lord. Who else would be allowed to rise above their station and receive the meagre financial backing of an elitist government in a democratically failing UK.

Controversial Investment: Chinese Firm CIC To Take Stake in European Eutelsat

China Investment Corp. (CIC) is buying a 7-percent stake in satellite fleet operator Eutelsat of Paris from Spain’s Abertis Telecom for 385.2 million euros ($500 million), a transaction that values Eutelsat at 5.5 billion euros, Abertis announced June 22.

Barcelona-based Abertis, which used to be Eutelsat’s biggest shareholder, has been gradually reducing its stake to refocus on investments in which it can gain a controlling interest.

In satellite telecommunications, Abertis has increased its ownership of satellite fleet operator Hispasat of Spain, in which it now has a 46.6 percent equity stake.

Abertis has long harboured ambitions to purchase a majority share of Hispasat but up to now the Spanish government, which through various state-owned entities owns around 26 percent of Hispasat, has declined to give its approval.

Abertis sold a 16 percent share of Eutelsat to several investors Jan. 13 in a transaction that valued Eutelsat at 6.1 billion euros. Abertis agreed to a six-month lockup of its remaining 15.35 percent holding, meaning it could not sell those shares until mid-July.

In its June 22 announcement, Abertis said Beijing-based CIC has agreed not to take ownership of the Eutelsat shares until the lockup period ends.

Eutelsat has been a profitable investment for Abertis since its initial acquisition in 2006. Its sale to CIC brings it a net capital gain of 237 million euros.

Abertis said it would “remain a Eutelsat shareholder, with a stake of 8.35 percent,” even though a minority ownership would appear to be at odds with Abertis’ stated goal of aiming for control of the assets its owns.

“Abertis keeps on reshuffling its holdings in the satellite infrastructure business, strengthening its commitment to growth, specifically targeting projects in which it can take an industry leadership role and a greater financial consolidation, as in the case of Hispasat,” Abertis said in the statement.

CIC, an aggressive Chinese sovereign-wealth fund, was formed in 2007 with a bond issue from China’s Ministry of Finance. The company used this to purchase $200 billion in China’s foreign-exchange reserves in strategically competitive infrastructure and rare-Earth mining corporations.

Although, in its 2010 annual report, issued in July 2011, CIC describes itself as “a financial investor. As such, it does not seek to control any sector or company,” Europe, Canada and the US are not convinced.

CIC’s investments in 2010 included minority stakes in power-utility AES Corp. of Arlington, Va., Chesapeake Energy of Oklahoma City and energy producer Penn West of Canada.

Given the U.S. government’s position on all things involving strategic space technology and China, the CIC acquisition may nonetheless raise issues.

UK Space Community benefits from £4.75m in Infrastructure Investment

The UK Space Agency will be channeling the new investment into three cutting-edge projects, including £3 million for a computing infrastructure at the International Space Innovation Centre for processing Earth observation data and making it more accessible for the UK space sector.

The three projects will rely on advances in computing, timing and data-handling to provide added benefits for industry and academia.

Centre for Climate Monitoring and Evaluation from Space (CEMS)
The CEMS at the International Space Innovation Centre will provide multi-sensor processing and a whole range of other tools and facilities for access, manipulation, visualisation and exploitation of data at realistic costs for companies (including SMEs).

UK Gaia Mission Data Processing and Analysis Centre (DPAC)
The University of Cambridge is receiving £0.75 million for a high performance computing system for the UK facility that will process the data from Gaia – Europe’s mission to examine the Milky Way in unprecedented 3-D detail.

The new computing system for the DPAC will support the effective use of mission data across the UK and beyond, including high bandwidth links to the data visualisation facilities at ISIC, Harwell.

Acquire and Exploit the Highest Quality Timing Data from Space (ACES)
Subject to approval by ESA and its Member States, £1M will be used to install a space-to-ground link from the planned ACES atomic clock system aboard the International Space Station to the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, thus allowing an ultra-precision space-based timing signal to be made available to the UK's leading centre of metrology.

The funding will also allow specialised hardware to be provided to distribute the signal to key research and application development users in the UK.

The new funding for these projects is part of the Government’s multi-million pound e-infrastructure investment to provide UK scientists and businesses with access to the most sophisticated technology, keeping them at the cutting-edge of research and development. Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts said:

“We should not think of infrastructure as just roads and railways – it’s also the networks and systems that underpin our world-leading science and research base.

This ambitious and forward-looking programme of investment will be vital for businesses and universities alike. It will improve research and manufacturing processes and reduce the time and money it takes to bring a product to market.

“This will drive growth and innovation across a whole range of sectors and ensure our leading institutions and companies are able to exploit the very latest technology.”

Canada's MDA Sees Business Case for In-orbit Servicing

Artist's image of MDA Corp's Radarsat-2

Canada’s MDA Corp., with little debt and now entering a period of predictably strong cash flows, believes its money is better placed investing in a future in-orbit satellite servicing business — something that has never been attempted — than in repurchasing its stock or increasing shareholder dividends, MDA Chief Executive Daniel E. Friedmann said May 5.

In the clearest indication yet that MDA believes it has found a sustainable satellite-servicing business model that has eluded everyone else, Friedmann said the Richmond, British Columbia-based company plans a major investment in the business starting late this year.

In a conference call with investors, Friedmann did not say how much MDA thinks it will need to finance a first robotic mission to deliver fuel or to perform another service on a satellite in orbit. He said “it may be more or less than” an investor’s guess of 200 million Canadian dollars ($195 million).

But he said the more the company investigates the business, the more potential missions, both commercial and military, it finds for a robot capable of attaching itself to a satellite in orbit.

“Certainly talking to defense customers, we’ve discovered markets we didn’t know we had an opportunity to go after,” Friedmann said. “It will be a significant use of capital for organic growth. That’s our first [near-term investment] priority as we work through the spring and summer to finalize it.”

MDA will likely withhold significant further cash investment until at least one firm customer signs up for a mission. But for now, the company is telling its shareholders that in-orbit servicing is MDA’s most promising new business venture.