In a rare acquisition, SpaceX saved a company that provided components for the Dragon spacecraft’s parachutes from bankruptcy. A federal bankruptcy court in Florida approved SpaceX’s deal to acquire Pioneer Aerospace for $2.2 million on Nov. 22. The deal was first reported by The Information.

Pioneer’s parent company, Aviation Safety Resources (ASR), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Middle District of Florida on November 1. ASR acquired Pioneer Aerospace from Safran Electronics and Defense in June 2022.

Connecticut-based Pioneer has been developing parachutes for space and other applications for decades. These studies ranged from capsules developed in the 1960s for possible use on the Gemini spacecraft, to parachutes used on Mars landing missions, and the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule. It also provided landing trays for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and its cargo version.

Pioneer Aerospace filed an asset purchase agreement with SpaceX in bankruptcy court on Nov. 9. Accordingly, SpaceX will purchase almost all of Pioneer’s assets for $2.2 million. This included wire and wire intellectual property “specifically SPX-00000432 Drogue Chute”. The bankruptcy court approved the sale on November 22.

Neither SpaceX nor Pioneer Aerospace has commented publicly on the deal, and Pioneer’s website doesn’t even mention the Chapter 11 filing. SpaceX did not respond to questions about the deal on November 29; The company rarely responds to media questions.

One industry source speaking on behalf of the story said the deal was likely an attempt to protect SpaceX’s supply chain and suggested that the cost of acquiring Pioneer after bankruptcy could be less than what SpaceX would spend to find a new wire supplier and retrain. This component is intended for use in manned missions.

Both SpaceX and Boeing, another company with a commercial contract with NASA, have attempted to develop parachutes for spacecraft and have sometimes failed in testing. Even after deployment, there were incidents such as “piled up” parachutes that deployed later than expected but did not pose a safety threat.

“It turns out that parachutes are much more complex than we thought,” Phil McAllister, NASA Headquarters commercial spaceflight division manager, said during a presentation on lessons learned from the commercial crew program at a NASA Advisory Board meeting Nov. 20. search and operating committee. “‘We parachuted at Apollo, how hard could it be?’ “We thought. It could be very difficult.”

He noted that much of the Apollo-era parachute experience dates back half a century and “may not have been as well documented as we had hoped.” He added that there is no major industrial base for large parachutes, making development difficult.

This acquisition is also notable because SpaceX rarely acquires other companies. SpaceX President Gwynn Shotwell said at the Satellite 2022 conference in March 2022 that the only companies SpaceX has acquired since its founding 20 years ago were an unnamed machine shop and Swarm Technologies, a startup developing a group of small satellites for the Internet. services of things (IoT).

The acquisition of Swarm, which the Wall Street Journal reported was valued at $524 million, was seen by many as a talent and technology acquisition. Although Swarm continues to provide IoT services to its existing customers, it has stopped selling new receivers and said that in the future, customers will be served with direct device connectivity features on Starlink satellites.