TechCrunch Space: Inverted

Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. We are insanely close to TechCrunch Disrupt — have you checked out the final agenda for the Space Stage yet!? Come hear the latest and greatest insights from top space entrepreneurs and investors.

NB: If you’re wondering why last week’s TechCrunch Space didn’t include a single mention of Starship’s fifth integrated flight test, it’s because these editions are finalized on Friday. Sometimes that means we miss important news — very important, chopstick-y news. Sorry!

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Story of the week

SpaceX filed a lawsuit against a California agency last week after the body rejected a proposal to increase the company’s launches from the state’s coastline to 50 per year. 

The California Coastal Commission made its decision at an October 10 meeting, despite the U.S. Air Force endorsing the plan on the grounds that more launches of Starlink and Starshield, the defense-focused unit, are critical to national security. 

In the lawsuit, SpaceX says that the commission engaged in “naked political discrimination” when some commissioners cited the political activity of CEO Elon Musk, while also attempting to unlawfully regulate federal agency activities. The first part of the complaint has gotten most of the headlines, and SpaceX will need to prove in court that the commission’s decision was substantially influenced by Musk’s politics. But the second part is arguably more substantial: What is the final legal authority over launch activities on a defense base, and do those activities count as federal or private when conducted by a commercial entity on behalf of the Department of Defense (DoD)?

Deal of the week

I had a lot of fun chatting with some of the co-founders of Wyvern, a Canadian hyperspectral imaging startup. The company just raised $6 million led by defense-focused VC firm Squadra Ventures to, among other things, expand into the U.S. market.

“As a Canadian company, we need to enter the U.S. market. We need to access key defense programs and bid on those sorts of programs of record,” co-founder Kurtis Broda said. (Co-founder Kristen Cote added, however, that “We are proud to be Canadian.”)

What we’re reading

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg took aim at NASA’s Artemis program this week in an op-ed at Bloomberg, calling it “a colossal waste of taxpayer money.” Beyond the engorged budgets of the Space Launch System rocket and other parts of the Artemis architecture, he points to a feasible commercial alternative that’s staring everyone right in the face: SpaceX.

“A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon — no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required — at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving.”