There’s little about building spacecraft that anyone would call simple. But there’s at least one element of designing a vehicle that will operate outside the Earth’s atmosphere that’s fairly easier to handle: aerodynamics. That’s because, at the altitude that most satellites operate at, drag can essentially be ignored. Which is why most satellites look like refrigerators with solar panels and high-gain antennas attached jutting out at odd angles.

But for all the advantages that the lack of meaningful drag on a vehicle has, there’s at least one big potential downside. If a spacecraft is orbiting high enough over the Earth that the impact of atmospheric drag is negligible, then the only way that vehicle is coming back down in a reasonable amount of time is if it has the means to reduce its own velocity. Otherwise, it could be stuck in orbit for decades. At a high enough orbit, it could essentially stay up forever.

There was a time when that kind of thing wasn’t a problem. It was just enough to get into space in the first place, and little thought was given to what was going to happen in five or ten years down the road. But today, low Earth orbit is getting crowded. As the cost of launching something into space continues to drop, multiple companies are either planning or actively building their own satellite constellations comprised of thousands of individual spacecraft.

Fortunately, there may be a simple solution to this problem. By putting a satellite into what’s known as a very low Earth orbit (VLEO), a spacecraft will experience enough drag that maintaining its velocity requires constantly firing its thrusters.  Naturally this presents its own technical challenges, but the upside is that such an orbit is essentially self-cleaning — should the craft’s propulsion fail, it would fall out of orbit and burn up in months or even weeks. As an added bonus, operating at a lower altitude has other practical advantages, such as allowing for lower latency communication.

VLEO satellites hold considerable promise, but successfully operating in this unique environment requires certain design considerations. The result are vehicles that look less like the flying refrigerators we’re used to, with a hybrid design that features the sort of aerodynamic considerations more commonly found on aircraft.

ESA’s Pioneering Work

This might sound like science fiction, but such craft have already been developed and successfully operated in VLEO. The best example so far is the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) back in 2009.

To make its observations, GOCE operated at an altitude of 255 kilometers (158 miles), and dropped as low as just 229 km (142 mi) in the final phases of the mission. For reference the International Space Station flies at around 400 km (250 mi), and the innermost “shell” of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are currently being moved to 480 km (298 mi).

Given the considerable drag experienced by GOCE at these altitudes, the spacecraft bore little resemblance to a traditional satellite. Rather than putting the solar panels on outstretched “wings”, they were mounted to the surface of the dart-like vehicle. To keep its orientation relative to the Earth’s surface stable, the craft featured stubby tail fins that made it look like a futuristic torpedo.

Even with its streamlined design, maintaining such a low orbit required GOCE to continually fire its high-efficiency ion engine for the duration of its mission, which ended up being four and a half years.

In the case of GOCE, the end of the mission was dictated by how much propellant it carried. Once it had burned through the 40 kg (88 lb) of xenon onboard, the vehicle would begin to rapidly decelerate, and ground controllers estimated it would re-enter the atmosphere in a matter of weeks. Ultimately the engine officially shutdown on October 21st, and by November 9th, it’s orbit had already decayed to 155 km (96 mi). Two days later, the craft burned up in the atmosphere.

JAXA Lowers the Bar

While GOCE may be the most significant VLEO mission so far from a scientific and engineering standpoint, the current record for the spacecraft with the lowest operational orbit is actually held by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

In December 2017 JAXA launched the Super Low Altitude Test Satellite (SLATS) into an initial orbit of 630 km (390 mi), which was steadily lowered in phases over the next several weeks until it reached 167.4 km (104 mi). Like GOCE, SLATS used a continuously operating ion engine to maintain velocity, although at the lowest altitudes, it also used chemical reaction control system (RCS) thrusters to counteract the higher drag.

SLATS was a much smaller vehicle than GOCE, coming in at roughly half the mass. It also carried just 12 kg (26 lb) of xenon propellant, which limited its operational life. It also utilized a far more conventional design than GOCE, although its rectangular shape was somewhat streamlined when compared to a traditional satellite. Its solar arrays were also mounted in parallel to the main body of the craft, giving it an airplane-like appearance.

The combination of lower altitude and higher frontal drag meant that SLATS had an even harder time maintaining velocity than GOCE. Once its propulsion system was finally switched off in October 2019, the craft re-entered the atmosphere and burned up within 24 hours. The mission has since been recognized by Guinness World Records for the lowest altitude maintained by an Earth observation satellite.

A New Breed of Satellite

As impressive as GOCE and SLATS were, their success was based more on careful planning than any particular technological breakthrough. After all, ion propulsion for satellites is not new, nor is the field of aerodynamics. The concepts were simply applied in a novel way.

But there exists the potential for a totally new type of vehicle that operates exclusively in VLEO. Such a craft would be a true hybrid, in the sense that its primarily a spacecraft, but uses an air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) system akin to an aircraft’s jet engine. Such a vehicle could, at least in theory, maintain an altitude as low as 90 km (56 mi) indefinitely — so long as its solar panels can produce enough power.

Both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the United States and the ESA are currently funding several studies of ABEP vehicles, such as Redwire’s SabreSat, which have numerous military and civilian applications. Test flights are still years away, but should VLEO satellites powered by ABEP become common platforms for constellation applications, they may help alleviate orbital congestion before it becomes a serious enough problem to impact our utilization of space.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it’ll be ramping up an ultra-high-speed satellite data network called TeraWave, which will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network for business from data centers, large-scale enterprises and government customers.

The service appears to dovetail with Amazon Leo, the satellite-based broadband internet service that was Bezos’ brainchild while he served as Amazon’s CEO. Amazon Leo — previously known as Project Kuiper — promises downlink speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). In contrast, TeraWave is targeting higher-end data applications with symmetrical data speeds of up to 6 terabits per second (Tbps), a rate that’s 6,000 times faster.

In today’s announcement, Blue Origin said TeraWave’s constellation would consist of 5,408 laser-linked satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO). It plans to start deploying the satellites in late 2027, presumably using the company’s New Glenn rockets.

Blue Origin’s plans are discussed in an application and technical annex filed today with the Federal Communications Commission. In its application, the company is seeking waivers from several regulatory requirements in order to get TeraWave off the ground quickly.

“TeraWave addresses the unmet needs of customers who are seeking higher throughput, symmetrical upload/download speeds, more redundancy and rapid scalability,” Blue Origin said. An array of 5,280 satellites in LEO would provide access speeds of up to 144 Gbps, while another 128 satellites in MEO would offer terabit-level speeds.

Blue Origin said the multi-orbit network design would facilitate ultra-high-throughput links between global hubs and distributed gigabit-scale user connections, particularly in parts of the world that are not well-served by optical fiber connections.

TeraWave could give Blue Origin a bigger role in knitting together a rapidly growing ecosystem of data centers and companies that are dependent on ultra-high-speed connections. SpaceX also plans to go after that market with Starlink V3 satellites that are said to be capable of terabit-level downlink speeds.

But what about Amazon, which is in the process of putting more than 3,200 satellites into low Earth orbit for Amazon Leo? Tech consultant Tim Farrar, the founder of TMF Associates, said the emergence of TeraWave raises questions about the relationship between the two best-known companies founded by Bezos.

“This is a very different design from Amazon Leo/Kuiper, but there is certainly overlap with Amazon’s target customers in the government and enterprise sectors,” Farrar told GeekWire in an email. “Is this all part of an ongoing negotiation with Amazon? … Or an alternative source of launch demand [for Blue Origin] in case Amazon decides to scale back their near-term space investments while they try to prove the case for Amazon Leo Gen1, before spending more money to launch a Gen2 system?”

Farrar speculated that the TeraWave initiative might represent an effort by Bezos to pressure Amazon’s current leadership to keep investing in space, or to spin off the Leo system to Blue Origin. He also said Blue Origin (Bezos’ private space venture) may be in a better position than Amazon (the publicly traded retail giant) to build out a next-generation satellite network.

“One takeaway is that everyone recognizes the value of vertical integration, where rocket makers create their own launch demand by building a constellation, as SpaceX has done,” Farrar said. “Amazon doesn’t have that right now, and it is a problem when you want to develop a mass-market satellite system with good enough economics to meet consumer price points, because you end up paying the full retail price for your launches.”

Unidentified hackers disrupted Iranian state television to broadcast messages from exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. Read about the economic crisis, the internet blackout, and the latest reports on the protest death toll.

Starfish Space has secured a $52.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency to dispose of military satellites at the end of their operational lives.

The Tukwila, Wash.-based startup says it’s the first commercial deal ever struck to provide “deorbit-as-a-service,” or DaaS, for a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit. In this case, the constellation is the Pentagon’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which provides global communications access and encrypted connectivity for military missions.

The contract calls for Starfish Space to launch the satellite disposal service in 2027.

“This is not research and development. This is an actual service, in a structure that allows that service to scale for this constellation, for an entire industry,” Starfish Space co-founder Trevor Bennett told GeekWire. He said the arrangement validates the Space Development Agency’s approach to building and maintaining its constellation, and also validates “the path that we can take with the industry at large.”

Starfish is developing a spacecraft called Otter that would be able to capture other satellites, maneuver them into different orbits, release them and then move on. In a deorbiting scenario, Otter would send the target satellite into a trajectory for atmospheric re-entry that wouldn’t pose a risk to other orbital assets. Starfish’s system doesn’t require the target satellite to be pre-outfitted with specialized hardware — which is a significant selling point.

The system provides an alternative to what typically happens to satellites toward the end of their lives. Today, most satellite operators either have to execute a deorbiting maneuver while they’re sure that the propulsion system still works, or risk having their spacecraft turn into unmanageable space junk.

Bennett compared Otter to a tow truck that can be brought in to carry away an old vehicle when it really needs to be scrapped.

“With the tow truck kind of capability, we can provide that service as needed, but we are not trying to replace normal operation,” he said. “We are augmenting it and extending it so the satellites that are being flown in that constellation can go fly longer. … Once it’s done operating and it’s time to dispose, we can provide that transit to the right disposable altitude.”

Starfish’s deal with the Space Development Agency builds on a previously awarded mission study contract that supported work on the concept in 2024 and 2025. The $52.5 million won’t be paid out all at once. An initial payment will cover costs leading up to the first deorbiting operation, and from then on, the agency will pay Starfish for services rendered. Bennett declined to provide further financial details, citing confidentiality.

Otter’s capabilities aren’t limited to deorbiting satellites. The oven-sized spacecraft could also be used to change a satellite’s orbital path, or bring it in for servicing. “With Otter, we’ve dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of satellite servicing across orbits,” Austin Link, Starfish Space’s other co-founder, said in a news release. “This contract reflects both the value of affordable servicing missions and the technical readiness of the Otter.”

Starfish conducted a partial test of its first Otter prototype, known as Otter Pup, in 2024. A second prototype, Otter Pup 2, launched in mid-2025 and is currently undergoing tests that could include a satellite docking attempt. “That vehicle remains healthy and operational, and is actually progressing through some additional mission milestones,” Bennett said.

Three other projects are in the works:

• Starfish is due to send an Otter spacecraft to hook up with a retired SES satellite in geostationary Earth orbit, or GEO, and maneuver it into a graveyard orbit. The Otter would then dock with a different SES satellite and use its onboard propulsion system to keep that satellite in an operational orbit for additional years of life. (The deal was originally struck with Intelsat, but that company was acquired by SES last year.)
• The Space Force’s Space Systems Command awarded Starfish Space a $37.5 million contract that calls for a different Otter spacecraft to dock with and maneuver national security assets in GEO.
• Yet another Otter is due to conduct up-close inspections of defunct satellites in low Earth orbit under the terms of a three-year, $15 million contract awarded by NASA in 2024.

“Those Otters are all under construction and in testing,” Bennett said. “Actually, we’ll see a couple of those launched this year. And so this is an exciting time, where Otters are about to go to space and start operating as commercial vehicles.”

Apple is reportedly preparing a significant leap in satellite connectivity with the iPhone 18 Pro, moving beyond emergency messaging to full 5G via Satellite.

The post Satellite 5G could be the next big upgrade for Apple’s upcoming ‘Pro’ iPhones appeared first on Digital Trends.

Sweden has signed a contract to acquire sovereign Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites from ICEYE, establishing a national space-based intelligence capability, the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration announced on January 12 in Stockholm. According to the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), the multi-million, multi-year agreement was formalized by Brigadier General Carl-Fredrik Edström, Director of the Air and […]

After taking one small but historic step for space-based AI, a Seattle-area startup called Starcloud is gearing up for a giant leap into what could be a multibillion-dollar business.

The business model doesn’t require Starcloud to manage how the data for artificial intelligence applications is processed. Instead, Starcloud provides a data-center “box” — a solar-powered satellite equipped with the hardware for cooling and communication — while its partners provide and operate the data processing chips inside the box.

Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston said his company has already worked out a contract along those lines with Denver-based Crusoe Cloud, a strategic partner.

“In the long term, you can think of this more like an energy provider,” he told GeekWire. “We tell Crusoe, ‘We have this box that has power, cooling and connectivity, and you can do whatever you want with that. You can put whatever chip architecture you want in there, and anything else.’ That means we don’t have to pay for the chips. And by far the most expensive part of all this, by the way, is the chips. Much more expensive than the satellite.”

If the arrangement works out the way Johnston envisions, providing utilities in space could be lucrative. He laid out an ambitious roadmap: “The contract is 10 gigawatts of power from 2032 for five years, at 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. That comes to $13.1 billion worth of energy.”

‘Greetings, Earthlings’ from AI

Putting the pieces in place for that business is a primary focus for Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which was founded in 2024 by Johnston, chief technology officer Ezra Feilden and chief engineer Adi Oltean. The co-founders are building on the experience they gained at ventures ranging from SpaceX’s Starlink operation to Airbus and McKinsey & Co.

Starcloud was one of the first startups to look seriously into the idea of using satellites as data centers. Initially, the business model focused on processing data from other satellites before sending it down to Earth, thus economizing on the cost of downlinking the raw data. Now, tech companies are also gauging the benefits of uplinking data to orbital data centers for processing.

The leading companies in AI — including OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta — are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers that are increasingly hungry for square footage, electrical power and cooling capacity. That has led the titans of AI, and startups like Starcloud and Sophia Space, to look toward Earth orbit as the next frontier.

Starcloud’s first big move in space came with last month’s launch of Starcloud-1, a 130-pound satellite equipped with an Nvidia H100 chip. Launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the mission aimed to prove that the hardware on Starcloud-1 could process AI data reliably in the harsh radiation environment of outer space.

This month, executives confirmed success. Using the Nvidia chip, Starcloud trained a large language model called NanoGPT, a feat that hadn’t been done in space before. The AI agent was trained on the complete works of William Shakespeare — and so it answered queries in sometimes-stilted Shakespearean English. (For example, “They can it like you from me speak.”)

Starcloud-1 produced better results with a pre-trained version of Gemma, an open-source AI model from Google. When asked for its first statement, Gemma responded with “Greetings, Earthlings! Or, as I prefer to think of you — a fascinating collection of blue and green.”

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is now executive chairman and CEO of Relativity Space, said in a post to X that Gemma’s performance was “a seriously cool achievement.”

Starcloud gets serious

Coming up with orbital witticisms is only the beginning. “We’re also going to be running some more practical workloads,” Johnston said.

Next year, Starcloud-1’s Nvidia H100 chip will start analyzing synthetic-aperture radar data from Capella Space’s satellite constellation. “The idea is that we can draw insights from that data on orbit and not have to wait a few days to downlink all that data over very slow RF ground-station links,” Johnston said.

Starcloud-2 is due for launch next October, with about 100 times the power-generating capability of its predecessor. It will carry multiple H100 chips and Nvidia’s more advanced Blackwell B200 chip. “We’re also flying some on-premises hardware from one of the big hyperscalers. I can’t say exactly who yet,” Johnston said.

“From there, we scale up to Starcloud-3, which is about a 2-ton, 100-kilowatt spacecraft that will launch on the Starship ‘Pez Dispenser’ form factor,” he said. “So we can launch many of those.”

How many? Johnston envisions a constellation of tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, or LEO. The satellites would travel in a globe-girdling “train,” with data transmitted from one satellite to the next one via laser links. “We just basically have a laser fixed [on each satellite], and then we very slightly adjust with a very finely tuned mirror. … You have one target that you’re aiming for,” Johnston said.

Johnston said the company has begun the process of seeking a license from the Federal Communications Commission for the Starcloud-3 constellation. The plan also depends on the development schedule for SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket, which would be charged with deploying the satellites.

Starcloud will need funding as well, from investors and from potential customers such as the U.S. Space Force. “We’ve raised about $34 million as of today,” Johnston said. “So we are funded actually through the next two launches at least.” He said the company may consider a Series A funding round in the first half of 2026 to support the development of Starcloud-3.

Starcloud currently has 12 team members. “We could easily triple the size of the team now … but we’ve got some of the most kick-ass engineers in the business,” Johnston said. The company is likely to be looking for a bigger facility next year. “We’ll stay in Redmond, almost certainly,” Johnston said.

Over the past year, industry observers have been debating whether orbital data centers could really offer a better value proposition than terrestrial data centers. But in light of the interest that’s been coming from the likes of SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, Johnston feels as if the debate has now been settled.

“People seem to trust that if Elon wants to do it, then there must be a sensible way to figure that out,” Johnston said.

Can Starcloud handle the competition from SpaceX or the dominant players in the data center market? Johnston noted that Google recently announced an AI-in-space moonshot called Project Suncatcher, “which is exactly what we’re doing.”

“They’re paying Planet Labs to do a demo in 2027, and as I understand it, the demo they’re doing in 2027 is less powerful than the one we’ve got in orbit — so we have a massive head start against all of those guys, AWS and SpaceX being the exceptions,” Johnston said.

“I think we become an interesting partner for some of those folks,” he added. “And I don’t mean an acquisition target necessarily. I do mean potentially a partner.”

Putting tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit sounds like a job of astronomical proportions. But if everything comes together the way Johnston hopes, Starcloud’s power-generating, data-crunching satellites could go even farther on the final frontier.

“There are many different places you can put them, further away from Earth,” Johnston said. “We’re looking at lunar orbits. We’re looking at some other Lagrangian points — the lunar L1 to Earth, also just the Earth L1. It’s actually less radiation than in LEO.”

Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space and California-based Impulse Space say they’ve successfully demonstrated an in-space satellite rendezvous during a mission that handed over control of an Impulse Mira spacecraft to Starfish’s guidance and navigation system.

The demonstration was code-named Remora, in honor of a fish that attaches itself to other marine animals. Operation Remora was added to Mira’s agenda for Impulse Space’s LEO Express 2 mission, which was launched in January. Impulse and Starfish waited until the Mira spacecraft completed its primary satellite deployment tasks for LEO Express 2. Then they spent several weeks monitoring the maneuvers for Remora.

“About a month ago, we concluded the major steps here,” Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett told GeekWire. “Since then, we’ve been getting data down and understanding the full story. And the full story is incredible.”

Remora was kept under wraps until today, primarily because both companies wanted to make sure that the demonstration actually worked as planned. “There was never a guarantee that there would be an outcome here,” Bennett explained. “And so what we wanted to do is talk about it when there was something to talk about.”

Bennett said the demonstration showed that Starfish’s software suite for guidance, navigation and control could be used on a different company’s satellite to make an autonomous approach to another spacecraft in orbit.

“Remora became definitely a first for us, in terms of being able to allow a whole new vehicle platform to autonomously do this full mission, all the way in and through,” he said. “Basically, we had no operator commands necessary for the vehicle to fly itself all the way down to 1,200 meters, take a bunch of pictures and then autonomously egress back out to further distances.”

Before launch, the LEO Express 2 Mira was equipped with a peripheral flight computer that was loaded with Starfish’s Cetacean and Cephalopod software. During the Remora mission, that Mira spacecraft used Starfish’s guidance system and a single lightweight camera system supplied by TRL11 to close in on a different Mira that had been used for Impulse Space’s LEO Express 1 mission.

As the distance decreased from about 100 kilometers (62 miles) to roughly 1,200 meters (three-quarters of a mile), Starfish’s software processed the camera imagery to generate estimates of relative position. Then it computed optimal orbital trajectories and commanded Mira’s thrusters to fire accordingly.

Starfish is working on an in-house spacecraft called Otter that will be capable of approaching and docking with other objects in orbit to conduct inspections, perform orbital servicing or get rid of space debris. Bennett said the success of the Remora mission could open up new market opportunities that don’t depend on Otter.

“What we’re trying to show is that you don’t have to design a vehicle just for RPO [rendezvous and proximity operations] and docking,” Bennett said. “You can design the vehicle for the core mission that it needs to do in addition to that. … What we’re trying to do is remove this high barrier to having RPO and docking be a mainstay in our industry.”

Eric Romo, president and chief operating officer of Impulse Space, said Remora was a plus for his company as well.

“Our Mira spacecraft uses high-thrust chemical propulsion, and what that means is, we’re typically pretty good at moving really quickly between two points in space,” he told GeekWire. But Romo said some potential customers have wondered whether Mira’s high-thrust system had the precision and accuracy that would be required when operating near another spacecraft.

For those customers, the Remora mission showed that there’s no trade-off between speed and accuracy, and that Mira “has the commandability and the controllability you need to do this type of proximity operation,” Romo said.

Bennett and Romo both said their companies would look at future opportunities for collaboration. “For us, the path forward is to pull it away from just a pure demonstration mission to a truly day-to-day capability that we rely on and build on,” Bennett said. “We’re very fortunate that Impulse was our partner up to this point, and I think there are plenty of opportunities for us to be partners going forward.”

In the meantime, both companies are busy with other projects. Starfish Space is in the midst of an Otter Pup 2 test mission that was launched in June — and the company has its first three full-scale Otter missions lined up for NASA, the U.S. Space Force and the SES satellite company (which acquired Intelsat) in the 2026-2027 time frame.

Impulse Space’s third Mira spacecraft was launched last month to deploy and host payloads for the LEO Express 3 mission. Looking ahead, Impulse is pursuing a partnership with Anduril to conduct a high-precision rendezvous and proximity operations mission in geosynchronous Earth orbit in 2026. And looking even further ahead, the company has laid out a roadmap for sending medium-sized payloads to the moon.