(Corrects paragraphs 1 and 7 to say Space Cargo is Starfall's first European customer, not the first customer overall)
By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, Sept 15 (Reuters) - SpaceX's new Starfall business of returning products and other payloads from Earth's orbit has signed a mission deal with integrator Space Cargo as the unit's first European customer, the company's Chief Executive Nicolas Gaume told Reuters.
Space Cargo aims to fly in 2028 an orbital reentry flight on the first commercial mission of Starship,
which will deploy SpaceX's Starfall - a disk-shaped capsule designed to carry materials on short trips through orbit and back to Earth.
Launched aboard Falcon 9 and eventually Starship, Starfall is an aluminum housing protected by a 10-foot (3-m) -wide heatshield that SpaceX offers to customers seeking to make products or do research in the microgravity of space.
Luxembourg-based Space Cargo will place its "BentoBox" system in the Starfall capsule, positioning itself as an integrator in the SpaceX program with plans to book more such future missions, Space Cargo CEO Gaume said.
"We're flying 200 kilos with our current systems, but with Starship and Starfall, we're going to go to ton and tons" of customer payloads, "and that’s really what we want," he added.
The box would secure up to 1 ton of different types of payloads from Space Cargo's own customers that it signed up for the mission, allowing them to survive reentry and be safely returned to Earth for commercial use.
The Space Cargo deal is the first known European customer for SpaceX's Starfall program, which emerged quickly earlier this year before demonstrating a capsule mission in June.
The product's central capability is its heatshield, a commodification of SpaceX's experience ferrying its larger Dragon capsules between Earth and space mainly for NASA.
The first BentoBox on a Starfall capsule will be among payloads on SpaceX's first commercial mission with Starship, SpaceX's giant next-generation rocket under development, Gaume said.
That mission is planned for 2028, Space Cargo said in a statement.
SpaceX, which did not respond to a request for comment, has not previously said when Starship will fly its first commercial mission.
The emerging business of returning payloads from space is valuable for customers such as drugmakers relying on the microgravity of space for research and production involving higher purities impossible to attain in Earth's gravity.
There are unique benefits of in-space production of other products, such as fiber optic cables, which are of higher quality when produced in microgravity on the International Space Station, NASA has said.
Nearly half Space Cargo's potential customers for its first Starfall mission are in the life sciences and biotechnology sectors, the company said.
The Starfall program joins a growing industry of capsule reentry services, where SpaceX faces rivalry from smaller startups such as California-based Varda Space, whose flagship capsule has flown 6 missions and lands in an Australian desert.
The Pentagon has seen capsule reentry missions, which must aerodynamically steer through the blazing-hot hypersonic speeds of atmospheric reentry, as useful for research and tests involving hypersonic weapons and as potential target practice for its Golden Dome missile defense program.
Gaume said flying its BentoBox with Starship and Starfall promises a fast pace of missions as SpaceX targets an unprecedented Starship flight rate once the rocket emerges from development.
BentoBox has plans to fly with other capsules, such as German startup ATMOS Space Cargo's Phoenix craft and the European Space Agency's Space Rider.
"It's really the volume and the rhythm" that makes the Starfall deal key, added Gaume, who declined to detail pricing and costs.
Starship is nearing routine flights but its development has been years behind schedule.
Its next text flight sometime this year, the 14th since 2023, will seek to put its first SpaceX-built Starlink satellites in orbit, followed by increasingly frequent in-house satellite launches that have come to dominate SpaceX's schedule.
The 2028 target for Starship's first commercial mission suggests several of the rocket's first flights throughout 2027 will serve SpaceX's Starlink satellite unit, and possibly its Starmind business of putting AI data centers in space if those satellites are ready in time.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
