Ariel demonstrated continuous steady pulses of up to five minutes duration.

Arkadia Space is conducting an extensive sea-level test campaign to increase pulse counts and propellant throughput per engine and to expand Ariel’s operational envelope.

Arkadia Space tested a 40-newton demonstrator and multiple 250-newton versions during the Ariel test campaign.

Arkadia Space signed a commercial contract with French launcher company MaiaSpace for integration of Ariel into MaiaSpace’s RCS in early 2025.

Ariel is compatible with hydrogen peroxide concentrations down to 90% as well as up to 98%.

Arkadia Space built a new test bench at its Castellón facilities specifically for high thrust levels and long combustion cycles in six months from design to operation.

CRC’s strategy is to build a scalable architecture around a methalox engine and to use high-TRL subsystems from the Canadian and European ecosystem.

Hugh Kolias is the CEO of Canada Rocket Company.

Maritime Launch Services had a suborbital launch attempt scheduled in late 2025.

NordSpace delayed its suborbital launch in Newfoundland and Labrador to no earlier than this year.

CRC’s hiring goal is to grow the team to 15 employees by the end of the year.

CRC’s staff includes alumni from SpaceX.

The seed funding round was co-led by the Business Development Bank of Canada and Garage Capital.

Additional investors in CRC’s seed round include Ripple Ventures, Panache Ventures, Northside Ventures, and Cold Capital.

CRC has received funding from a shortlist of Canadian founders and angel investors associated with Shopify and Kepler Communications.

CRC plans to create sovereign light- and medium-lift launch capabilities for Canada.

CRC was founded late last year in response to increasing Canadian investment in the space domain.

CRC aims to develop and test its E-1 engine by the first half of next year.

CRC plans to add a turbo-pump setup for extra engine power by early 2028.

Canada Rocket Company (CRC) is a Toronto-based launch startup.

Maritime Launch Services supported Dutch company T-Minus Engineering’s rocket launch from Nova Scotia in November.

CRC emerged from stealth last week with a $6.2 million Canadian seed funding round equivalent to $4.5 million USD.

NordSpace, Reaction Dynamics, and Maritime Launch Services are other companies pursuing launch capabilities in Canada.

NordSpace had a suborbital launch attempt originally scheduled in late 2025.

Alpha Flight 8 is planned to fly the full Block II upgrades.

Some Block II upgrades, including the in-house avionics and thermal protection improvements, will be tested on Alpha Flight 7.

Block II is designed to expand Alpha’s deployable launch capabilities for critical responsive space missions such as hypersonic testing, national security missions including Golden Dome, and commercial satellite launches for domestic and international customers.

Block II will increase Alpha’s length from approximately 97 feet to 104 feet with design optimizations for rapid manufacturing on Firefly’s Automated Fiber Placement machine and increased strength of all carbon composite structures.

Firefly Aerospace will implement a Block II configuration upgrade for the Alpha rocket focused on enhancing reliability, streamlining producibility, and improving launch operations to support commercial, civil, and national security mission demand.

Firefly aims for Block II upgrades to increase manufacturability through consolidated parts, key configuration updates, and stronger structures built with automated machinery.

Alpha Flight 7 will operate with multiple Block II subsystems in shadow mode to gain flight heritage and validate lessons learned ahead of the full Block II upgrade on Alpha Flight 8.

Block II consolidates batteries and avionics into an in-house system used across Firefly spacecraft and rockets to increase schedule, reliability, and production efficiencies, replacing off-the-shelf batteries and avionics.

Firefly will retain its flight-proven Reaver and Lightning engines and its carbon composite structures as the core technology of the Alpha vehicle during the Block II upgrade.

Firefly delivered the Alpha first stage to its launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base and is conducting final integration with the second stage and payload fairing ahead of the static fire and launch.

Alpha Flight 7 is targeted to launch in the coming weeks and will be the last Alpha flight in the current configuration.

Block II optimizes liquid oxygen and RP-1 tank configurations and improves the thermal protection system to increase stage burn time and add reliability.

Commercial satellite lifetimes have compressed to around eight years or ten years at most.

Much of current satellite orchestration is still undertaken manually, which is not scalable for highly agile, multi-mission constellations.

Wider adoption of advanced manufacturing and training technologies can enable production lines to scale to meet surging demand for new constellations.

Martin Halliwell is a Partner at NewSpace Capital, a private equity firm dedicated to growth investing in the space economy.

Satellite manufacturing has only begun to adopt virtual and augmented reality tools that can shorten production cycles, reduce errors, and improve safety.

Orchestration in satellite constellations involves deciding which users get capacity and where and when they get it.

For most of the history of the industry, satellites were designed to endure in orbit for decades as capital assets.

Modern spacecraft can steer thousands of beams in milliseconds to carve up coverage dynamically.

On-board processing driven by AI accelerators lets satellites analyze data in situ, filtering and classifying data before transmission to Earth.

The commercial space race is increasingly defined by speed of deployment, speed of iteration, and speed of learning.

Martin Halliwell served as Chief Technology Officer of SES and led global technology and R&D from 2011 to 2019.

AI can predict traffic flows in satellite networks and enable more intelligent resource allocation similar to air-traffic control.

Artificial intelligence can anticipate jumps in demand and adjust beam position before a human operator would.

Satellites using on-board AI processing can transmit roughly the 1 or 2 percent of collected data that matters instead of gigabytes of raw material.