The Seraphim team had an equal parts exciting / nerve-wracking few hours over the weekend as we waited to watch SpaceX's record breaking launch of 143 smallsats. 

With twelve satellites / spacecraft from three of our portfolio companies - Iceye, Spire and D-Orbit - on board, we had a lot riding on a successful launch.

Spire had eight of its Lemur satellites on board. We continue to believe that Spire's constellation of 100+ satellites is going to dramatically improve our ability to accurately forecast the weather - something that is more important than ever as we face ever greater climate-change induced extreme weather events.  

The three Iceye satellites on board the mission has now seen the business reach the landmark of having now successfully launched 10 satellites over the last 3 years. With so many satellites launched, Iceye is now really starting to deliver on enormous potential of high revisit SAR data / imagery to have a dramatic impact on many different sectors. 

D-Orbit's 'Pulse' mission follows hot on the heels on the inaugural mission of its Ion 'space taxi / space tug' last September. As we wrote at the time, we see these initial D-Orbit missions - whose customers include some of the biggest names in the sector - as ushering in the dawn of the in-space transportation market, marking the beginning of the era of the in-space economy. 

Back down on Earth, another of our portfolio companies - LeoLabs - also has an important role to play in the success of the SpaceX mission. Releasing 143 small satellites in quick succession makes identifying / tracking each of the individual satellites a real challenge. This is something LeoLab's network of ground-based radars capable of tracking objects as small as 2cm up to 1,000km up into Space can help resolve. We see 'Space Traffic Management' as being a bedrock of the future Space economy; as more and more small satellites are being launched, it becomes of ever greater importance to be able to track precisely where every satellite and every piece of Space debris is.

So yesterday was a great day for SpaceX and a great day for our portfolio!