10 Smallsat Startups to Watch

The global startup space industry is thriving. Startup space ventures brought in a record $15 billion in financing in 2021, and seed investments in startups rose by 46 percent, according to BryceTech’s annual Startup Space report. Activity is happening all around the globe, as established space powers continue to progress and other countries invest in their space capabilities.

In this new feature, Via Satellite highlights 10 Smallsat Startups to Watch — a group of startups in the smallsat arena primarily in early funding rounds or pre-funding that may not receive much media attention. These companies represent a range of capabilities like in-space manufacturing, space situational awareness, and IoT, and span the globe from South Africa to Portugal and beyond.

Gilmour Space

Gilmour Space, the venture-backed Australian rocket company developing new capabilities for launching small satellites to space, may not receive the same amount of media attention as its neighbor Rocket Lab in New Zealand, but it has achieved several groundbreaking milestones over the course of a decade. Founded by two brothers Adam and James Gilmour in 2013, the company is leading Australia's new space industry bringing innovative hybrid propulsion technologies to market.

Gilmour Space launched Australia's first privately developed hybrid rocket six years ago in a world-first demonstration of a rocket launch using 3D-printed fuel. In 2017, it became one of Australia’s first space startups to receive significant venture capital investment. Just one year later, Gilmour Space signed a Space Act Agreement to work with NASA on various space research, development and education initiatives. It also has strategic agreements in place with the Australian Space Agency and Northrop Grumman to work on developing sovereign space capabilities in Australia.

The company is developing a three-stage rocket for launching small satellites into Low-Earth Orbits called Eris. The first and second stages of Eris are powered by Sirius, a large hybrid rocket engine which is undergoing qualification tests. In May, Gilmour Space unveiled its new Phoenix 3D printed liquid rocket engine that will power the third stage of its Eris rocket to orbit. Gilmour Space hopes to clear regulatory approvals in order to conduct the Eris maiden launch at the end of this year from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland, Australia. — Jeffrey Hill

Impulse Space Propulsion

When Tom Mueller’s name is in the same sentence as “propulsion startup,” the space industry pays attention. Mueller is one of the leading propulsion engineers of the present day. As a founding employee of SpaceX and its former vice president of Propulsion Engineering, he led the team that developed the Merlin, Kestrel, and MVac engines and Draco thrusters for the Dragon spacecraft. He retired from SpaceX in late 2020 and founded Impulse Space Propulsion in September 2021. The company is based in El Segundo, California.

Impulse Space hasn’t shared many details about its plans yet, but is pitching itself as a solution for last-mile delivery in space — fueling satellites to their final orbits, in-orbit servicing, space debris deorbiting, and space station orbit keeping. And the company recently announced a develop a Mars Cruise Vehicle and Mars Lander and launch with Relativity Space in what could be the first commercial mission to Mars.

The management team is stacked with SpaceX alums, including former BridgeComm CEO Barry Matsumori, recently named COO. It also recently closed a $20 million seed round led by Founders Fund, the VC firm founded by Peter Thiel. While there are a number of players in the orbital transfer vehicle space, like Spaceflight, Rocket Lab, D-Orbit, and Momentus, don’t bet against this team’s engineering credentials. — Rachel Jewett

Innova Space

When IoT startup Innova Space launched its first satellite on SpaceX’s rideshare mission in January 2022, it was a milestone not only for the fledgling company, but also for Mar del Plata, a city on Argentina’s Atlantic coast. The company has an unconventional origin story, it came about through a school project. Mar del Plata teacher Alejandro Cordero wanted to make an impact on the province of Buenos Aires, so he started a project with his students to build a satellite, he told local media El Destape. The team went so far as to present a scientific paper at the PocketQube Workshop in 2019 in Scotland. This got the attention of Mar del Plata tech accelerator Neutron, which supplied initial funding. Cordero has a background in business and took the venture from an educational project to a company, with additional government funding.

Innova Space recently saw the launch of its first tiny picosatellite in partnership with Alba Orbital. The satellite, named San Martín, will serve as a tech demonstration to provide IoT communications to Latin America’s growing agriculture, mining, and oil and gas sectors. Innova Space plans for a constellation of around 90 satellites, called the Libertadores de América constellation. Argentina has robust agriculture and mining sectors, and as much of the country is outside of cellular networks, it is a natural market for IoT connectivity. This company, which started as a classroom project, hopes to bring the IoT to rural Argentina. — Rachel Jewett

Mission Space

A solar storm generated headlines earlier this year when one knocked out 40 newly launched Starlink satellites. The geomagnetic storm incident, which increased atmospheric drag, highlighted this potential danger to satellites. Mission Space, a Latvian startup, is building a constellation to monitor space weather. Just like weather on Earth can cause disruptions, space weather can disrupt satellites, avionics systems onboard planes, GNSS services, and even power grids.

The company has developed a payload to track a variety of measurements related to near-Earth magnetic and solar wind conditions. It plans to use algorithms to analyze the data to provide space weather forecasts that will help satellite operators prepare for solar storms, assess risks, and monitor radiation levels. Mission Space is deploying its constellation in partnership with Bulgarian manufacturer EnduroSat, which will host and operate Mission Space’s payloads. The company plans for 24 payloads in its constellation, with the first launch planned for the end of this year.

The company is led by Ksenia Moskalenko, one of the few female CEOs in the new space economy. It was selected as one of AWS’s 10 startups for its 2022 space accelerator program, and also participated in the Seraphim Space Camp. It will be interesting to see how Mission Space takes advantage of these opportunities, and if it can disrupt space weather monitoring, an area typically handled by government agencies. — Rachel Jewett

Neuraspace

The challenges that space debris presents are well known, and everyone is looking for space traffic management solutions as more and more satellites are launched to orbit. Neuraspace, a company based in Portugal, is focused on using AI and machine learning to help deal with this problem. The company is developing a space situational awareness platform that pulls together different types of data and performs analysis using AI technology. It claims that current, human-based solutions take a team of professionals eight hours to deal with a single close encounter, while its solution can tackle 50 encounters in one hour.

The company was founded in 2020 by Nuno Sebastião, co-founder and CEO of Feedzai — a data science company that uses machine learning to fight financial crime. Sebastião previously worked at the European Space Agency (ESA) Operations Center and saw firsthand how AI/ML could help the space sector in the same way it has helped the finance sector. He hired COO Chiara Manfletti to lead the company. She is a researcher and former ESA advisor and served as the first president of the Portuguese Space Agency. Nueraspace recently closed a seed funding round to commercialize its platform, and is one to watch for its potential impact on the Portuguese space sector and space situational awareness ecosystem. — Rachel Jewett

Open Cosmos

Open Cosmos delivers satellite-captured environmental data packaged as actionable solutions for government, commercial, and industry customers. Its main offering is DataCosmos – a multi-satellite all-in-one platform that digitalizes visualization data and ‘translating’ it into numbers that can be visualized or run through algorithms to solve environmental challenges.

The platform incorporates different types of satellite imagery and data, as well as algorithms and applications from various sources in what may be one of the most complete in-the-box space data platforms. DataCosmos is pre-loaded with a back catalog of information from SpaceWill, Geosat, Sentinel, and Landsat, as well as aerial imagery, accessible through a comprehensive tasking interface. All of this is designed to make it easy for the customer to understand the data.

“There is no need to leave the browser when using DataCosmos,” Rafel Jordá Siquier, who founded the company in 2015, writes in Open Cosmos’ mission statement. Headquartered in the Research Complex at Hartwell in the United Kingdom, the company has a long list of civil and commercial space partners and has most recently signed a contract with the European Space Agency to progress key elements of the planned NanoMagSat mission – a small satellite constellation that is designed to monitor Earth’s magnetic field and ionospheric environment. — Jeffrey Hill

Satlantis

Small satellite imaging payload manufacturer Satlantis is part of a wave of Spanish space startups looking to position the European nation as an established space technology leader. The company sees itself as unique among its peers in an ever-growing competitive field due to the speed of its promised delivery to the customer and the spectral capture capabilities of its high and very high-resolution optical technology.

To answer end users’ increasing demand for precise geo-requirements such as following irregular geometry on Earth, the company provides reliable and innovative integrated satellite solutions built around its customizable high and very high-resolution optical payloads. Satlantis serves customers in the environment, energy, national security, and defense markets. The company’s latest iSim [integrated Standard Imager for Microsatellites] product line represents a new generation of optical imagers for Earth observation satellites, as they operate in the visible, near infrared and short-wave infrared spectral ranges.

Satlantis sent an iSIM-90 payload to the International Space Station (ISS) on the SpaceX CRS-24 cargo mission in late December 2021. Its iSIM camera unit docked to the orbiting ISS laboratory’s Harmony module after less than 24 hours in flight, allowing it to participate in CASPR experiments alongside Satlantis partners at the National Science Foundation, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Florida. — Jeffrey Hill

SETS

Space Electric Thruster Systems (SETS) is a dynamic startup in Ukraine, a country that is under siege right now. The company was formed in Dnipro, Ukraine in 2016, and is producing electric rocket propulsion systems and subsystems designed for use on almost any satellite. The technology aims to provide orientation and stabilization of spacecraft in a near-Earth orbit and allows for the removal of space debris by deorbiting satellites at the end of the active mission. The company aims to use a flexible development methodology that it says will reduce the price of the propulsion system without compromising quality.

The company has ambitious goals, aiming to be a key supplier for satellite constellations with its scalable manufacturing process and additive principles embedded in the propulsion system architecture. SETS began the first tests of its Hall thruster this year. It also uses 3D printing technology in the construction of its thrusters which it believes will not only speed up the manufacturing process, but can have a significant impact in terms of price.

SETS has already signed two contracts for two of its propulsion systems and this year is on track to obtain a flight-proven status for its products. With the Ukrainian space industry at a crossroads, this company could be the jewel in Ukraine’s space crown. — Mark Holmes

Simera Sense

Africa is a hotbed of interesting new space startups. One of these is Simera Sense, which was created in 2017 as an offshoot of the Simera Group, which was formed in 2010 as one of the earliest companies in the South African space industry. Simera Sense aims to produce end-to-end off-the-shelf optical payload solutions for smaller satellites. Its range of products targets the medium to high-resolution imagery market for cubesats, micro, and small satellites. Its current product portfolio provides spatial resolutions from 30 meter to 1.5 meter GSDs with video, multispectra, and hyperspectral options.

Over the last two years, it has manufactured more than 25 payloads for companies across the globe. Many of these customers have the ambition to launch large constellations to serve the Earth observation market, and selected Simera Sense to assist with their proof-of-concept missions and eventually scale their business models. Some of its customers include Sen in the U.K. and Promethee in France. With dealflow mainly outside of Africa, the company is starting to make an impact on the world stage. Simera Sense hopes to grow its production capacity by more than ten times over the next two years to keep up with what it sees as strong demand for optical payloads. In addition, to keep up with industry expectations, it is expanding its onboard processing capabilities to provide raw data and intelligence with its imagers. — Mark Holmes

Space Forge

The U.K. is full of vibrant startup space companies as the nation has prioritized space as a growth industry. Space Forge, founded in 2018, stands out from the pack. It is developing a fully returnable and relaunchable satellite platform, to unlock the benefits of space for manufacturing and experimentation at scale. It is a hugely ambitious company. The key technology it is developing is centered on making access to space as easy as possible and managing how to return platforms from space gently, and sustainably.

Space Forge sees a large market potential for in-space manufacturing. It has identified multi-billion markets for several material classes, and says demand is currently not met due to lack of a dedicated platform, no soft return capabilities, and a heavy reliance on the International Space Station. Its dedicated solution, the ForgeStar, is a flexible modular satellite consisting of the orbital module and an interchangeable microgravity capsule, to enable reliable, safe and predictable return to Earth and access microgravity on demand. The first satellite is scheduled to launch next year.

After ForgeStar, it has two additional missions planned. As launch capability continues to increase globally and the small satellite market continues to grow, Space Forge hopes it will be able to offer a unique service to customers who want to harness the space environment. — Mark Holmes VS