Around $8.3 Million has been raised in seed funding by Momentus, a space transportation startup, for its business to provide satellite operators travels from one orbit to another, as declared by the company. With the raised funds, Momentus intends to display its Vigoride rocket motorized by water-plasma thrusters within orbit in the coming year, said Mikhail Kokorich, President and Founder of Momentus.
In a statement, the Prime Movers Lab founder, Dakin Sloss, said, “Momentus hasn’t only developed efficient and pioneering water-driven in-space rockets but also corroborated the huge market stipulate for their services in Letters of Intent with hundreds of millions of dollars.”
He continued, “We are excited to support this amazing group of seasoned entrepreneurs as well as space industry veterans in their remarkable speed of launching novel technology to space that we anticipate will carry on with the imminent in-space demonstration in 2019’s first half.”
Momentus intends to start providing in-space transportation with Vigoride, a vehicle to budge payloads as huge as 50 kg from low Earth orbit to lunar orbit, geostationary orbit, geostationary transfer orbit, or other destinations in 2020. Momentus, in 2020, intends to start validating its next-generation Ardoride, a vehicle developed to ship 250 kg to Mars orbit from geostationary transfer orbit or 180 kg to lunar orbit from low Earth.
Momentus is looking to considerably decrease the cost of in-space transportation. Kokorich said, “We would like to make it very low-priced. The ticket cost for a 100- to 200-kg weight to Moon orbit low Earth orbit and to low Earth orbit from Earth should be under $10 Million. I anticipate we can be way under $10 Million.”
On the other end, as we know, SpaceX in the past few years has lost one probe on the launchpad and the other broke apart on the way to the ISS. Nonetheless, the firm is on a roll as it close to 3 dozen successful Falcon 9 blast-offs consecutively.