Momentus Inc. (NASDAQ: MNTS) (“Momentus” or the “Company”) has provided their fourth Mission Update on the firm’s inaugural Vigoride mission that launched on May 25th.
Since the Company’s last update on June 29th, Momentus has successfully deployed four additional customer satellites.
Momentus initially deployed two customer satellites from its Vigoride-3 Orbital Transfer Vehicle on May 28th. The most recent deployments of four additional customer satellites occurred in July. The Company also deployed one customer satellite on May 25th from a third-party deployer that flew on a second port of the launch vehicle.
A total of seven Momentus customer satellites have now been deployed to LEO and three, yet-to-be-deployed satellites, remain on Vigoride.
As stated in past updates on the initial Vigoride mission, after experiencing anomalies on the spacecraft, the Company has continued efforts to deploy additional customer satellites. The Company continues to monitor the Vigoride-3 vehicle’s status and will continue efforts to deploy the remaining three customer satellites onboard.
Momentus’ plans for additional launches of the Vigoride vehicle later this year and in 2023 remain as stated in the Q1 earnings call on May 10, 2022, with agreements signed with SpaceX for launches on upcoming Transporter missions in 2022 and 2023, including Transporter-6 that is currently targeted for November of 2022.
Momentus has identified the root cause of the anomalies experienced during the initial Vigoride demonstration mission. The Company convened an Independent Review Team of highly experienced space experts who reviewed the root cause findings of Momentus engineers and concurred with their findings. Momentus has made good progress in implementing corrective actions on the Vigoride-5 vehicle that the Company plans to fly on the SpaceX Transporter-6 mission.
“We have completed our own internal reviews and welcomed an independent review team that conducted a comprehensive assessment of our first mission,” said Momentus Chief Executive Officer, John Rood. “We learned a lot from our first Vigoride demonstration mission already and intend to learn everything we can before the mission is over. Albert Einstein famously remarked, ‘The only source of knowledge is experience,’ and we are intently focused on implementing the knowledge and lessons learned from the experience of our first demonstration mission on our second Vigoride demonstration flight this fall.”
Momentus is a U.S. commercial space company that plans to offer in-space infrastructure services, including in-space transportation, hosted payloads and in-orbit services. Momentus believes it can make new ways of operating in space possible with its planned in-space transfer and service vehicles that will be powered by an innovative water plasma-based propulsion system that is under development.