Satellites can accomplish incredible tasks like provide internet, or help monitor wildfires. But many of them ultimately meet a fiery death burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Others use their last bit of fuel to move to so-called “graveyard” orbits, where they circle the planet in a perpetual deep freeze.
A new startup called Lux Aeterna wants to change this. The Denver-based company, which is coming out of stealth today, has designed a reusable satellite called Delphi that it aims to launch — and land — in 2027.
If successful, it could help slash the cost to get satellite payloads into space. It would also make the process far more flexible than it is today, since satellites are designed to stay in orbit for years and essentially can’t be modified for other uses.
These attributes have already piqued the interest of the Department of Defense, which has made low-Earth orbit an important part of the United States’ military strategy.
Venture capitalists have also taken notice — and written checks. The startup’s pitch was attractive enough to generate $4 million in pre-seed funding, led by Space Capital and including other early-stage funds like Dynamo Ventures and Mission One Capital.
Founder and CEO Brian Taylor said the idea for Lux Aeterna came to him last year while he watched his former employer, SpaceX, launch one of its Starship test vehicles into space.
“I want to fill Starship with something amazing, and something that changes the entire industry,” Taylor recalled thinking during an interview with TechCrunch.
Starship is the biggest rocket ever built. As part of that, it has the potential to send larger payloads into space than was previously possible. Size matters for people who build satellites and other spacecraft, since they’re often working backwards from the simple constraint of what can fit inside a rocket’s cargo area. And Starship is not alone — there are other heavy-lift rockets in the works, too, like Blue Origin’s New Glenn.
It’s hard to design a satellite that can survive the brutal forces of re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds. But with the extra space afforded by heavy-lift rockets, Taylor said it’s possible to build one that can survive multiple re-entries without having to compromise on the technology because of cost or weight tradeoffs.
In the case of Lux Aeterna, that means using a heat shield. In the rendering the startup released Wednesday, the Delphi satellite’s conical heat shield is reminiscent of the ones that protected some of NASA’s most famous spacecraft.
There’s a reason for that, according to Taylor: Those designs worked.
“We definitely looked at what NASA had done in the past on exploratory missions [and] sample return missions, and that really helped justify the architecture that we’ve gone with,” he said. “I think it’s very important, when you’re doing something ambitious like this, that you’re not reinventing the wheel on everything, right?”
Taylor declined to get into further specifics about how the Delphi satellite will work, or how Lux Aeterna will refurbish the craft between launches. (The design appears to involve the ability to fold the satellite bus structure so that it fits safely behind the heat shield.)
To be sure, he has plenty of experience in the satellite world. In addition to working on Starlink at SpaceX, Taylor also worked on Amazon’s Kuiper satellite program, and at space infrastructure startup Loft Orbital.
The plan for Delphi is to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2027, perform a full orbital flight, and then come back down to Earth. Then Lux Aeterna wants to do that all over again to prove out Delphi’s reusability.
From there, Taylor said his team is working on a larger production vehicle that will demonstrate far greater reusability.
Despite decades of spaceflight innovation, Taylor said he believes the industry is still very young, which leaves plenty of opportunity for a company like Lux Aeterna to establish a long-running business.
“It’s not to the maturity level of [computer] chips. It’s not at the maturity level of automotive,” he said. Satellite reusability will help change that. And while Taylor is committed to that cause, he said he’s thrilled about all the things he can’t imagine that will exist in a space-based economy.
“We don’t know what we don’t know is going to come,” he said. “That’s probably the most exciting part.”