Astra Space seemed poised to dominate the smallsat propulsion landscape. Its 2021 acquisition of Apollo Fusion positioned the Northern California company as a favored partner among prime contractors building satellites for the U.S. Space Force Space Development Agency.
Astra’s subsequent financial troubles have prompted a significant realignment within the smallsat propulsion industry. Severe cash flow issues nearly drove the SPAC-funded rocket startup to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy this year, shaking investor confidence in the sector and prompting customers to scramble for new suppliers. The uncertainty has led to reduced investment for some companies, and forced competitors to adapt quickly. Many companies have restructured operations, expanded facilities or formed new partnerships in an effort to attract large constellation orders. The disruption in the sector, caused in part by Astra’s struggles, highlights the interconnected nature of financial health and market stability.
In addition, after years of development, new thrusters are being flight tested. And satellite manufacturers are demanding speedy delivery, prompting propulsion suppliers to scale up capacity.
The smallsat propulsion market is “in the middle of the churn right now,” said Gabriel Benavides, senior researcher and engineer in the NASA Glenn Research Center’s Electric Propulsion Systems branch. “There will be those that come out on top and those that don’t.”
Hype cycle
A few years ago, analysts tracking emerging satellite constellations predicted sky-high demand for smallsat propulsion. Massive commercial and military constellations were being proposed, investment capital was flowing into space-related startups and companies were positioning themselves for massive orders. While demand for propulsion has grown, it has not lived up to the hype. SpaceX, the largest constellation operator, produces its own Hall-effect thrusters.
“The total addressable market for propulsion is smaller than we thought it would be, smaller than people said in their 2021 pitch decks,” said a propulsion industry executive.
The hype coupled with the dip in Astra shares from $12.35 in 2021, when the company went public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, to 53.9 cents in mid-July, when Astra co-founders Chris Kemp and Adam London took the company private, has “scared away a lot of investment in Astra competitors,” said a space industry executive and investor.
Ramping up
Despite the chilling effect Astra has had on the investment climate, some startups are still proving they can raise money, expand manufacturing and speed up deliveries. These companies are successfully navigating the challenging environment and attracting funding for new factories to increase production capacity.
“We are living in a fast-paced world. Nobody has the time to wait a year for any subsystem,” said Morpheus Space CEO Daniel Bock.
“There are missions that they want to occur tomorrow,” Benavides said. “If you can’t deliver, they’re going to find somebody that can.”
A propulsion executive added, “People are asking for hardware in five or six months. We work miracles pretty regularly, but we cannot make material appear out of thin air. When we exhaust our inventories, we need to go back to supply chain.”
Natick, Massachusetts-based Busek stepped up production of Hall-effect thrusters when the war in Ukraine prevented Airbus OneWeb Satellites from purchasing thrusters from another supplier, Russia-based EDB Fakel. Busek is continuing to speed up manufacturing due to an influx of constellation orders.
“What the market is asking for is a dependable supplier who has the scale to meet the market demand,” said Busek Vice President Peter Hruby. “That’s the space we want to occupy.”
Benchmark Space Systems, a firm known primarily for nontoxic chemical propulsion, began large-scale production of its first electric thruster, Xantus, after the metal-plasma thruster reached orbit for the first time earlier this year.
Near its Burlington, Vermont, headquarters, Benchmark has established a 3,700-square-meter facility to design, test, build and integrate chemical, electric and hybrid propulsion systems.
“We have immediate capacity for about 100 systems a year and the building can be configured for 200 systems a year,” said Chris Carella, Benchmark chief commercial officer.
Similarly, ExoTerra Resource opened a 3,500-square-meter production facility in Littleton, Colorado, to address a backlog of more than 200 propulsion modules.
In late July, Morpheus opened a 1,260-square-meter factory in Dresden, Germany. Initially, the factory will produce 100 Field Emission Electric Propulsion-based GO-2 electric propulsion systems per year. With additional staff and equipment, the factory can be scaled to manufacture 500 units annually.
Even Hawthorne, California-based Phase Four, a company known for radio-frequency thrusters, is entering the Hall-effect thruster market through a partnership with Redwire Corp. Redwire and Phase Four announced plans in July to jointly develop Valkyrie, a thruster based on a NASA-licensed design.
“Anticipated supply in the market isn’t coming online as fast as people hoped, while demand grows unabated,” said Phase Four CEO Steve Kiser. “So, of course, we’re going to make the strategic decision to jump into an under-supplied market.”
Attention to detail
Experts are not surprised by growing pains in the smallsat propulsion sector.
Some propulsion companies “are chasing the wrong things,” said Tomas Svitek, president of Stellar Exploration of San Luis Obispo, California. “They worry about fancy manufacturing techniques, fashionable propellant, new business models, maybe an extra digit in the performance specs. But in the end, it is all about the basics — make sure the tank does not leak and the system works as promised.”
What’s more, companies that successfully flight test a single propulsion system often struggle to produce dozens or hundreds. Add onto that the difficulty of keeping a business afloat like raising money and hiring people.
“It’s a lot to ask of any young, innovative company,” said Al Tadros, Redwire chief technology officer.
Startups often excel at innovating “technologies, designs and development, but getting to quality and then scaling that quality to full-rate production is an issue,” Tadros said. “Part of that is because you can get an A team to build the first item, but you need to document processes, develop supply chains and develop manufacturing facilities in order to get to the full-scale production
required for proliferated low-Earth orbit constellations.”
To ramp up production, Morpheus brought in a new chief operations officer, Martin Kelterer, whose previous roles at Mercedes-Benz included head of production engines. Under Kelterer’s guidance, Morpheus has worked to reduce the amount of manual labor involved in manufacturing and to establish clear quality-control processes.
Ensuring that every propulsion system from a manufacturing line works like every other one can be difficult and expensive. Each step in the manufacturing process requires painstaking attention to detail.
“It’s more complicated than cutting a piece of metal,” Benavides said. “It’s how you cut it, the acceptance testing, the heat treatments, the coatings, the way in which you handle it, the cleanliness. All these things add up in terms of costs.”
Tough Love: Why NASA gives smallsat production such a hard time
Propulsion problems began soon after NASA launched Lunar Flashlight in 2022. In early commissioning, two of the four thrusters on the cubesat built to look for water ice on the moon produced little to no thrust, preventing the spacecraft from reaching lunar orbit.
NASA officials emphasize the experimental nature of Lunar Flashlight, which demonstrated many novel technologies. Still, the mission underscored a lesson hitting home with many spacecraft operators: Smallsat propulsion is hard.
“Miniaturizing chemical and electric propulsion systems for small satellites is complicated,” said Bruce Yost, director of NASA’s Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute.
Some smallsat propulsion systems have narrow channels for delivering propellant to the thrust chamber. A NASA investigation determined that small particles blocked propellant lines in Lunar Flashlight’s additively manufactured propulsion system.
“You have to be very careful with those systems as they’re being manufactured and prepared for flight, because a little bit of contamination will mess up the whole thing,” Yost said. “Whereas the bigger systems may not have that problem at that scale. They have other problems, obviously.”
Extensive abuse
NASA’s plans to send cubesats to the moon and Mars can stress the most carefully designed propulsion systems.
One of the twin Mars Cube One satellites overcame a fuel leak on its journey to the Red Planet. And CAPSTONE, the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, reached lunar orbit in spite of problems with a malfunctioning thruster valve.
Most cubesats and small satellites operate in low-Earth orbit. Whereas NASA seeks smallsats that can “go farther, last longer and operate in some pretty nasty space environments,” Yost said. “The other thing we want to do is start and stop over and over again. Some propulsion systems haven’t been designed for such a long life of abuse.”
In spite of those hurdles, NASA officials see promise in the burgeoning smallsat propulsion market.
“A whole boatload of companies” are focusing on propulsion, from small startups to large aerospace technology suppliers, Yost said. Plus, many different chemical and electric propulsion technologies are being flight tested.
“We’re not stuck up the creek without a paddle. We just need a better paddle,” Yost added.
Five years ago, discussions at propulsion conferences often revolved around new technologies and laboratory testing.
“Now a lot of the conversation has shifted to units that have flown,” said Gabriel Benavides, senior researcher and engineer in the NASA Glenn Research Center’s Electric Propulsion Systems branch.
Enabling technology
Some of the technologies haven’t been demonstrated extensively, but “they are flying and they have some real data,” Benavides said. “The fact that they even got into space with a mission to begin with is a huge step.”
Demand for smallsat propulsion is coming primarily from commercial communications constellations and military organizations. The U.S. Space Force Space Development Agency, which plans to deploy hundreds of satellites for missile warning and missile tracking, is having a particularly important influence on the marketplace.
In contrast, NASA is “not yet buying or fielding the high numbers of smallsats yet,” Yost said. “We hope to, someday.”
There’s no question that NASA’s future smallsat swarms or constellations will need propulsion to
desaturate attitude control wheels and move around in orbit.
“Propulsion has been holding back our ability to get these missions going and to field them,” Yost said.
If NASA had access to some “fairly reliable propulsion systems, you would see a whole other layer of science applications within NASA open up,” Yost said.
“People would start to be comfortable funding those missions. Propulsion is an enabling technology for us.”
This article first appeared in the August 2024 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
