Technology

Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle has received Category 1 certification from NASA, meaning it is authorized for use on more important missions, opening up a whole new revenue stream for the growing launch provider.

The certification was largely based on the success of &This Onefor Pickering& in late 2018, the companyfourth commercial launch, which took a batch of NASA cubesats into orbit as part of the ELaNa-19 mission. This experimental mission was undertaken as part of NASAVenture Class Launch Services initiative to test out newer and smaller launch vehicles using non-critical payloads.

&We have a strong partnership with NASA that was established through the ELaNa-19 launch and continues today with the upcoming CAPSTONE mission that will see our Electron launch vehicle and Photon spacecraft deliver a NASA satellite to lunar orbit next year,& said Rocket Lab CEO and founder Peter Beck in a news release.

Certification categories go from 1-3, from &high risk& to &low risk,& based largely on successful launches, which as you might imagine is something of a catch-22: You need the launches to get the certification, but you need the certification to get the launches. Fortunately, one can break the cycle with non-essential missions like small experimental satellites — which is sort of the purpose of the VCLS program.

NASA also conducts careful inspections of facilities, manufacturing, and all that. NASADarren Bedell, risk manager for the agencyLaunch Services group, noted that &Rocket Labmanagement team are deliberate in ensuring processes are controlled, repeatable, and measurable to ensure mission success.&

Category 2 certification is in process, but is of course even more stringent and requires six consecutive successful missions with the same rocket configuration. Rocket Lab has 10 in a row at present, but therelikely a lot of paperwork involved as well.

The companynext launch is for NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the University of New South Wales — window opens on March 27 (local New Zealand time).

Yesterday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a lockdown for six Bay Area Counties: San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda. The public health order marks a big step to help reduce the movement of the nearly 7 million people within the Bay Area, as well as the potential transmission of COVID-19.

It is important to note that the mayor, as of today, has not issued a complete and utter lockdown. This means you can still go outside for exercise and leisure, as well as heading to your local grocery store (mine is giving out free flowers to stressed shoppers). You also can order food delivery from your app of choice. Some restaurants are offering food to-go, or if you&re Black Hammer Brewing, crowlers and growlers to-go.

Per the SF Chronicle, bicycling for exercise is fine, as well as driving to hiking trails and beaches for fresh air. I highly recommend a morning stroll at Lands End or Fort Funston. You&ll also catch a good sunset at Bernal Heights or out on one of the numerous piers.

The guidance, if you leave your house, is to remain six feet away from another individual at all times.

After recreational and medical dispensaries were told to halt sales this morning, the San Francisco Department of Public Health tweeted that they can remain in business.

Update: after this story was published the San Francisco Department of Public Health tweeted, saying that dispensaries are &essential businesses& and are open. The story has been updated to reflect this change.

This all in mind, letend on a general note. Be kind, tip well and be thankful for moments of humanity and love in this moment of stress. Everyone is scared, and buying out the storequantity of toilet paper in one go might not be as thoughtful as you think.

Lime is pausing its electric scooter operations in California and Washington, as well as throughout the countries of Italy, France and Spain to help keep riders safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

&Like you, we are worried about the cities we love and call home, the people we serve, and our colleagues on the ground,& Lime wrote in a blog post today. &Loving cities means protecting them too. For now, we&re pausing Lime service to help people stay put and stay safe.&

The announcement came a day after San Francisco ordered residents to shelter in place, and shortly before New York City told residents to prepare for a shelter-in-place order.Lime will continue operating in other markets but says it has enhanced its cleaning and disinfecting methods.

Spin, on the other hand, is choosing not to suspend its service in San Francisco, unless the city explicitly asks it to. Thatbecause it imagines the public transportation system will need support as people are taking essential trips to places like the grocery store or pharmacy.

&During this challenging time in our nation and in light of the CDCguidance to avoid public transportation to limit exposure to COVID-19, we believe that Spin scooters can be another safe and reliable option,& Spin CEO Derrick Ko said in a statement. &To the extent that it is safe for our employees, we plan to work with the City to determine how best we can support the Citydesire and needs for continued safe operations of essential transportation, from rides to grocery stores and pharmacies to medical care and testing facilities.&

In a letter to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency yesterday, Ko outlined how Spin is ready and able to work to support healthcare workers, sanitation workers and other workers who may benefit from its scooters. Currently, Spin is more frequently disinfecting scooters and also encouraging riders to disinfect the handlebars before and after their ride. As for Lime, it says it will keep riders in the loop regarding when it will redeploy its scooters.

In a volatile trading session that saw the White House signal intentions to release the largest stimulus package since the great recession of 2008, American stocks made up for yesterdaylosses with major indices rising sharply.

The return to gains was welcome after stocks posted huge losses to begin the week, tripping the marketcircuit breakers for the third time in the current period of trading tied to the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

The response to the White Houseplan to stem economic fallout from the virus is receiving — today at least — good marks.

Part of the plan includes providing Americanwith direct financial aid in the form of cash. Other governmental action will provide emergency paid medical leave pay, though America will still lag sharply behind the rest of the world when it comes to worker care. How a few weeks of paid leave will hold up against a patchwork, but increasingly broad, national quarantine isn&t clear at this time. One of the countryleading political parties was opposed to a more permanent fix.

The U.S. government is not alone in its stimulus plans. The U.K. announced a nearly $400 billion package today, for example. Many other governments have executed other packages, and central banks are doing their bit as well.

Today at the bell the scorecard read as follows:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: climbed 4.93%, or 994.50, to close at 21,183.02
• S-P 500: rose nearly 6%, or 142.67 points to close at 2,528.80
• Nasdaq Composite: was up 430.19 points, or 6.23%, to close at 7,334.78

Each index remains far below its recent highs, and all three are still in bear-market territory.

Individual Performance

Shares of Slack, the popular workplace app that got hit after its guidance was a bit light, rallied today. Uber and Lyft, hit hard in recent weeks as the world has slowly ground to a halt, fell today.

SaaS shares rallied as a group, but failed to make up much ground compared to their recent highs; they remain sharply depressed from prior levels. Cryptos have rallied some in the last 24 hours as well, but, like with most assets, remain far under preceding highs and other local maxima.

In short, while todaytrading was more than welcome, it was just lukewarm comfort after Mondayepic sell-off. And with the U.S. COVID-19 tallies rising, it isn&t clear if tomorrow is going to follow Tuesdaydirection. After all, this rally came after a meltdown.

Automakers

The Big 3 U.S. automakers — GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — saw shares push lower early in the day. Ford closed flat with a share price of $5.01, while GM and FCA saw shares close 3.24% and 3.12%, respectively.

Automakers globally are facing a downward slide in sales and supply constraints as economies deal with the affects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ford, VW and Daimler were just a few of the automakers to suspend production at factories across Europe.

Tesla saw shares close 3.34% lower to end the day at $430.20. Tesla shares have continued their volatile run, kicking off the year at around the $430 mark, eventually trading as $917.42 on February 19 and then falling to todayclosing price of $430.20.

Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers called on GM, Ford and FCA to shut down factories in the U.S. for two weeks over concerns about the spread of COVID-19.

With the explosive popularity of B2B services startups, it was only natural that a B2B startup would come along thatoffering a service to help startups become enterprise services themselves.

WorkOS, which is launching out of stealth with seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others, is building a toolkit to help startups meet the requirements for bringing on enterprise clients. The company aims to get startups set up with an API for single sign-on, directory sync, audit trails, role-based access controls and other key services.

As more startups look to approach enterprise from a bottom-up capacity and focus on creating individual use cases, quickly meeting IT administrators& expectations can become a shortcut to higher-margin customers. The inspiration for WorkOS came from its founderprevious email startup, which tried to make a play for enterprise adoption and clients but couldn&t cross what he calls &the enterprise chasm.&

&The feedback I got was, this is a great app but we can&t buy this as a company because you&re not enterprise-ready,& CEO Michael Grinich told TechCrunch in an interview. &Even if you focus on the end user experience, therea different buyer at the end of that tunnel with a different set of needs.&

Becoming enterprise-ready means meeting the same compliance requirements that IT administrators need to adhere to, something that can obviously be an issue for a small startup thatlight on resources. On the security side, Grinich says that WorkOS is currently in its SOC-2 Type 2 observation period and should receive certification in Q2 of this year.

These are uncertain times to be a startup launching publicly, but Grinichdescription of his company as a &highway onramp to get into [enterprise] ecosystems,& seems apt for startups seeking to quickly build out new revenue streams. Right now, WorkOS operates across a few pricing structures, with a free tier that brings users single sign-on support, as well as a $99/mo developer tier and $499/mo corporate tier that scale up WorkOSoffered functionality substantially.

First Round, SV Angel, Abstract Ventures, Tuesday Capital and Work Life Ventures are also backers.

Pharma giant Pfizer announced on Tuesday that itworking on a potential COVID-19 vaccine with BioNTech, a German company working on new kinds of immunotherapy treatments. The joint effort, confirmed Tuesday via a signed letter of intent, will see both partners work together on a messenger RNA-based vaccine that will seek to prevent people from contracting the new coronavirus.

Itworth a reminder that any vaccine is going to take, at minimum, between a year and 18 months to develop and certify for general human use, so don&t think that this is going to result in any kind of short-term solution. But the collaboration does bring together one of the largest and most established players in the realm of pharmaceutical biotech with a younger company working at the forefront of mRNA-based immune therapies.

These therapies don&t use samples of the virus itself, as typical vaccines do (in either dead or weakened form, to jump-start the bodynatural defenses). Instead, they rely on RNA to kickstart the production of proteins similar enough to the virus that they trigger the bodydevelopment of antibodies effective against the actual target.

This collaboration should result in a clinical test that could kick off as early as April. Both parties aren&t starting from scratch in terms of their work on mRNA-based vaccines: they began working together on R-D to create treatments for the flu starting in 2018.

While work on the collaborative effort begins immediately, across teams located in both the U.S. and Germany, the two partners still have to hammer out details, including financial terms and commercialization of whatever results. The fact that they&re willing to begin working before the ink is dry on those details should give you some idea of the urgency felt behind the project.

This isn&t the only mRNA-based potential COVID-19 vaccine in development: Earlier this week, Moderna announced that they&d already begun human clinical trials of their own coronavirus immunotherapy, after fast-tracking its development in partnership with the National Institutes of Health.