Satsearch announces €250 million strategic investment in emerging spacetech
Over the past few years we have supported hundreds of mission teams building the space technologies and organizations of tomorrow - facilitating €100s of millions in sales, procurement, and business opportunities worldwide along the way.
To shake, I mean build on, this strong foundation we are very excited to announce, alongside our funding partners, strategic investments in two key areas of emerging space technology totalling approximately a quarter of a billion euros.
As the premier digital supply chain platform in the industry, we have an unrivalled view into both demand and supply across the global market.
And these new investments give us an opportunity to deploy our knowledge and insights to affect direct change in the commercial and non-commercial sectors.
The two areas of focus are explained in more detail in the article sections below.
Improving missions through low power, low accuracy inter-satellite communication
The industry has been aware of the significant promise of optical inter-satellite links (OISLs) for many years.
Free space optical communication (FSOC) enables high data rates across unregulated frequencies, with significant SWaP savings compared to radio frequency systems.
But the technical challenge of accurate transmitter/receiver orientation and pointing, in order to enable an optical connection, is significant. And, despite being lower power than RF solutions, laser comms systems do still consume major wattage on board.
SatShout LLC is a US-based university spinout building an exciting new alternative; audio inter-satellite links (AISLs).
The company has developed a unique approach to orbital soundwave creation, based on high-energy nitrogen, oxygen, and argon particle development and acceleration.*
AISLs are designed to enable any space-based asset to interface with nearby systems at a fraction of the power budget required for optical communication.
To ease industry adoption, SatShout is first focussing on 3 key in-orbit satellite communication protocols enabled by AISL:
AISL technology is currently at TRL -5 with an IOD mission planned, or at least discussed, in the near future. As soon as the company CEO has finalized his doctoral thesis on recent advances in porcine aviation.
Signals from the industry have so far been pretty positive, with one major target strategic customer in Italy, for example, saying:
Non vogliamo assolutamente avere niente a che fare con tutto questo.
Reducing space debris through enhanced satellite protection
The safety and sustainability of the orbital environment is the shared responsibility of everyone in the industry. Especially yours.
To mitigate it's impacts, there are a wide variety of solutions at various stages of development; from tracking and monitoring through to active debris removal.
Our second announced investment is in a company called Stealth Mode, which is taking a unique approach to the space debris problem by focussing on significantly enhanced satellite protection and discoverability.
Stealth Mode is based in Eastern Europe (we're not sure where exactly) and develops highly protective space-based coatings and communication signal disruption systems.
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This innovative technology can divert and disrupt monitoring systems based on the ground and in space, ensuring satellites (or other hardware) are fully hidden from tracking systems.
The aim is to one day enable all satellites to complete their missions successfully without creating new observable space debris.
As Stealth Mode CEO Dr. Susan Storm-Richards explains:
Space debris is only really said to be increasing because the numbers of satellites and debris pieces tracked using monitoring systems are increasing.
If we can reduce those numbers, or at least not add to them, by creating space-based assets that cannot be tracked at all, we will be able to help humanity feel that space is safer and better looked after.
Although it has been around for several years, Stealth Mode had a difficult start to life as a company, as Dr. Storm-Richards explained:
I guess if you call your company Stealth Mode you're asking for trouble. The press wouldn't cover us accurately and investors kept asking me the same question about our name, over an over, no matter how many times I answered.
But by far the worst thing was being contacted by tax authorities all round the world to explain why it was that we appeared to have a tiny market cap, and no revenue, yet LinkedIn implied a workforce of tens of thousands!
Through our investment, satsearch aims to support Stealth Mode in it's go-to-market strategy over the next few weeks (we've got something to do after that).
We will also help facilitate the development of a new software system designed to create an accurate and realistic simulation of the successful de-orbit of any satellite.
Stealth Mode hopes such simulations will satisfy the regulatory requirements for safe de-orbits following the completion of a mission, while avoiding the SWaP-C budget requirements, and additional engineering complexity, that real on-board de-orbiting solutions typically demand.
Charting a new course
Direct investments into individual companies is a significant departure from satsearch's traditional business of improving space industry buying and selling at scale.
And while we expect a few bumps along the way, this is an evolution that needed to happen. Perhaps.
As satsearch Head of Marketing Hywel Curtis explains:
There comes a time in every company's life when you see too many good ideas get all the funding and the press and the excitement, while terrible ones fall by the wayside. And that's a shame.
One of the foundations of our investment thesis is rapid determination, as Hywel explains:
We know that not every decision pans out when it comes to early-stage investing, so we decided to streamline the process entirely and delay all decision-making until after the investments have played out. Let's see how it goes.
(On a side note, we actually lost the original, and only, copy of our investment thesis at Amsterdam Schiphol airport a few weeks ago - so please keep an eye out for it. It's written on the back of a car park receipt and might smell faintly of beer.)
We hope you'll follow along with us on this exciting new investment journey - and do let us know if you have any thoughts on what the hell we should do next.
In the meantime - happy April!
CEO & Co-founder @ IENAI SPACE | PhD Plasma Physics & Nuclear Fusion | Aerospace Engineer | - Ad Astra per Somnia - | "Dream in atoms, not in bits."
8 个月Dr. Storm and her husband are well respected aerospace engineers with a nick for adventuring into new Space business models, I wholeheartedly support anything coming from them!
Passionate about taking deep tech companies from 0 to 1; space, aerospace, defense, AI, additive manufacturing, propulsion
8 个月I think if Sam Altman was rumored to trying to raise?$7 trillion for something as boring as microchips, you should be raising something on the order of World GDP so around ~$100 trillion to go mine that $900 trillion asteroid to 10X the world economy.