Spaceflight Industries was founded in 2009 as Spaceflight Services by Jason Andrews, with Curt Blake joining soon thereafter as SVP and General Counsel. Prior to founding Spaceflight, Mr. Andrews worked at Kistler Aerospace and founded Andrews Spacein 1999. Mr. Blake has previous experience at Microsoft, Starwave, SpaceDev, and GotVoice. Spaceflight Services purchased excess capacity from commercial launch vehicles and resold it to a number of "rideshare" secondary payloads, along with providing integration and certification services. By integrating all of the secondary satellites as one discrete unit to the launch vehicle, they were able to provide a significant price discount to reach orbit compared to buying an entire launch vehicle. Blacksky Global was founded in 2013 as an independent company owned by Spaceflight specializing in imaging-as-a-service. Spaceflight Networks was started in 2014 to provide a network of ground stations for low-latency communication with cubesats and other small satellites. In 2015, Spaceflight Services, Spaceflight Systems, and Spaceflight Networks, were consolidated under the Spaceflight Industries brand. The same year, Blacksky announced plans for a constellation of 60 satellites that would provide low-cost satellite imagery of any location on earth within 90 minutes. In March 2018, Spaceflight and Thales Alenia Space announced a joint venture, LeoStella, to build small satellites. LeoStella opened its production facility in February 2019. In 2020, Spaceflight Industries sold its rideshare business, Spaceflight, Inc. to Mitsui and Yamasa, in order to invest more funds in BlackSky.
BlackSky
BlackSky, Spaceflight Industries' geospatial intelligence service, plans to offer on-demand images from a constellation of satellite. Their first satellite, Pathfinder-1, was launched on 26 September 2016, and the first pictures were released publicly on 14 November 2016. In late 2018, BlackSky launched Global-1 and Global-2, two of the company's next generation global satellites, aboard the SSO-A mission. The company is aiming for a 60-satellite constellation, which will offer 1-meter resolution and rapid satellite revisit rates. The satellite constellation is currently being built by LeoStella LLC, a joint venture between Spaceflight Industries and Thales Alenia Space.
