Stoke Space says it has raised roughly $1 billion to get ready for the first launch of its fully reusable Nova rocket — and to scale up the rocket’s design for even bigger payloads.

To accommodate its grander ambitions, the Kent, Wash.-based startup is also scaling up its rocket test facility in Moses Lake, 175 miles to the east.

“We have confidence in the foundation that we’ve laid today, and now it’s time to scale,” Stoke Space CEO and co-founder Andy Lapsa told GeekWire.

The newly announced Series E financing round was co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator and other investors.

The final figure will be “within rounding error” of a billion dollars, Lapsa said. “Not quite, or a little more,” he said. “The speed with which this has come together is very fast.”

Lapsa said that scaling up the Nova rocket’s design was always part of Stoke Space’s game plan, but that the timeline is being accelerated in response to the growing demand for launches and the shrinking availability of launch opportunities.

The timing of Stoke’s pivot to a bigger launch vehicle wasn’t sparked by a single event, Lapsa said. “The pressure has been growing over the last couple of years,” he said. “It certainly hasn’t slowed down recently.”

From Pathfinder to Block 2

The revised plan calls for Stoke to begin launching missions with the initially designed rocket, now known as Nova Pathfinder. Pathfinder’s first stage will be powered by seven of Stoke’s Zenith engines, and the upper stage’s Andromeda engine will have a ring of 24 thrust chambers integrated into an actively cooled metallic heat shield. The rocket will be capable of putting 3 metric tons of payload into low Earth orbit, or LEO.

Pathfinder’s first launch is now scheduled for early 2027 — a slight slip from earlier expectations. It will carry a spacecraft for AstroForge, a California-based asteroid mining company. “We’re going out to the asteroid belt, and yeah, Astroforge is our partner for that one,” Lapsa said. “They’re looking to prospect and ultimately mine asteroids, and bring back rare earths and other important materials.”

The super-sized version of Stoke’s rocket, known as Nova Block 2, is due to make its debut in 2029. Its first stage will have twice as many Zenith engines as Pathfinder. Its upper stage will have 12 independent engines, each with two thrust chambers. That will increase Nova’s lift capability by a factor of five, enabling up to 15 metric tons of payload to be delivered to LEO. More than 4 tons can be sent to geosynchronous transfer orbit, or GTO.

In comparison, SpaceX says its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket can deliver 18.5 tons to LEO or 5.5 tons to GTO in reusable mode.

Both versions of the Nova rocket are designed to be fully reusable, with the first-stage booster flying itself down to a recovery ship and the upper stage making a separate re-entry. Stoke is only the second company in the space industry to pursue that strategy. SpaceX has designed its Starship launch system for dual-stage reusability but hasn’t yet reached that goal.

Stoke is developing an active-cooling system for upper-stage reusability. Some of the rocket’s cryogenically cooled liquid hydrogen propellant is circulated through channels in the upper stage’s metallic heat shield to absorb the intense heat of atmospheric re-entry. SpaceX has been experimenting with different heat shield strategies for Starship, but some experts have expressed doubts about SpaceX’s approach.

Both versions of Stoke’s rocket are designed to fill a market niche that’s different from Starship’s. The Nova rockets’ capabilities fall close to both ends of the medium-lift spectrum, while SpaceX’s super-heavy-lift Starship is designed to loft 100 to 150 tons of payload to LEO.

Expanding the infrastructure

Stoke Space’s 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters facility in Kent was designed from the beginning to manufacture rockets that are bigger than Nova Pathfinder.

“We bring in raw sheet metal, we build our core and we ship a rocket,” Lapsa said. “We can use the same methods and effectively the same tooling to build larger diameters and larger lengths, and that’s very intentional.”

The company’s rocket test facility in Moses Lake is being expanded from 75 to 550 acres to accommodate work on two types of rockets simultaneously.

“We’ve done, I would say, an extremely efficient job at leveraging the 75 acres that we use today,” Lapsa said. “The expansion across the street is going to enable us to test again at rate. … Certain of our facilities have an overlapping blast radius, so they interfere with each other. A big advantage of being able to spread our wings a little bit, and get a little bit more space, is that those test stands can operate in full independence of each other.”

Stoke’s launch facilities at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida can also accommodate a dual-track approach. A new payload processing facility at the Cape is intentionally sized to support both Nova Pathfinder and Block 2.

In June, Stoke Space’s Moses Lake facility completed what the company called proto-qualification testing of the first-stage booster for its first Nova Pathfinder rocket. “The second stage will ship out pretty soon,” Lapsa said. “That goes to Moses Lake. … This will be acceptance testing of the structure, and then we’ll do a static hot-fire test out there to fully shake down the second stage, and then it ships out to Cape Canaveral.”

The booster is being prepared for shipping to the Cape as well. “We’ll repeat the wet dress rehearsals that we did in Moses Lake, but we’ll do it on the launch pad itself,” Lapsa said. “Then we’ll do the same thing: static fire test on the first stage down there, and then the two stages go together, and we go to space.”

Stoke Space has been on a phenomenal growth curve since Lapsa and his fellow co-founder, chief technology officer Tom Feldman, left Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture in 2019 to create the company.

Lapsa said Stoke currently has about 400 employees. “It’s approximately 50 in Moses Lake, 50 in Cape Canaveral. We have a handful of remotes, and then everybody else is in Kent,” he said.

Even though Stoke Space hasn’t yet launched a rocket, the startup’s steady progress toward that milestone — and its long-term vision for total rocket reusability — have been impressive enough to keep investors on board.

“Having supported Stoke through multiple stages of its growth, we believe this company has demonstrated both the exceptional technical progress and the ambition to build a launch system capable of serving the market at industrial scale,” Chris Morales, partner at Point72 Ventures, said today in a news release.

“Full reusability is the inevitable end state of the market, providing an order-of-magnitude cost and service advantage over partially reusable rockets,” said Clay Fisher, general partner at Spark Capital. “Stoke had the right thesis seven years ago and has paired that prescient vision with a blistering pace of execution. As a result, they stand uniquely positioned to give customers more choice and capacity when they need it, and to unlock an enormous new economy in space.”

Lapsa said he’s grateful for the vote of confidence.

“We’re humbled by the investment, having great partners behind us,” he said. “It’s an incredibly critical and important moment for us as a civilization to get right. I think space development is really, really important for our ability as a civilization to continue to scale and continue raising the quality of life that we enjoy — and we’re thrilled to be part of it.”

California-based Cowboy Space is leasing a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Wash., to support the production of hardware for its planned constellation of AI data center satellites, according to the company that arranged the lease.

“According to Newmark Research, the transaction is the largest industrial lease in the Puget Sound region year-to-date,” Newmark, the real estate broker for the deal, said in a news release. Newmark represented CenterPoint Properties, Cowboy’s new landlord.

The facility at 7650 S. 228th St. previously served as a Costco distribution and delivery center. “This building was originally designed for large-scale logistics users, but Cowboy Space recognized the opportunity to reimagine it as a highly specialized production facility,” said Taylor Hoff, a vice chairman at Newmark’s office in Bellevue, Wash.

Newmark said Cowboy Space plans to convert the facility into a manufacturing operation supporting space and rocket development. The operation is expected to add 300 jobs, Newmark said. Cowboy is currently listing 46 Kent-based positions in its careers database.

The city of Kent, which is about 20 miles south of Seattle, is one of the hotspots for space companies in the Pacific Northwest. Boeing’s Kent Space Center remains active more than 50 years after building NASA’s Apollo moon rovers. The city also hosts Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Stoke Space, which was founded by Blue Origin alumni.

Cowboy Space, previously known as Aetherflux, plans to send its own rockets into low Earth orbit starting as early as 2028, with the upper stages outfitted to serve as solar-powered orbital data centers. The Stampede constellation is one of several planned projects aimed at getting around the land, power and water constraints that have made ground-based AI data centers increasingly controversial.

“We are building what I call the last big clean-sheet launch vehicle in my lifetime, so it’s going to be a very big heavy-lift vehicle, and we’re working every day to bring it to reality,” Warren Lamont, Cowboy Space’s head of launch and propulsion, said this week in a LinkedIn video. Lamont, who previously worked for IonQ and Blue Origin, is one of the executives heading up Cowboy Space’s engineering hub in the Seattle area.

The company announced in May that it raised $275 million in a Series B funding round, in part to expand its production capability. Cowboy is collaborating with Nvidia to deploy the chip giant’s Nvidia Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules in orbit. And in July, it secured a deal to test its propulsion system at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

“We’re really excited to get into first engine hot-fire next year,” Lamont said.

Cowboy Space’s potential competitors include SpaceX, which wants to launch up to a million AI-processing satellites; and Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which is setting up a production facility in Woodinville, Wash., and seeking authorization for up to 88,000 data center satellites.

We’ve reached out to Cowboy Space and will update this report with any new information.

REDMOND, Wash. — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman came to Rocketdyne’s facility here today to give a pep talk to the space company’s employees — and lay out his vision for the future of America’s space effort.

Isaacman made clear that nuclear power will be a big part of that vision.

“NASA is at our best when we’re doing the near-impossible,” he said. “There is no obvious revenue model or business case for what we’re doing. We’re just out there pursuing the secrets of the universe, and nuclear or fission-powered spacecraft make sense in that it helps us extend our reach farther into the solar system.”

The pathfinder mission for NASA’s nuclear ambitions is likely to be SR-1 Freedom, a Mars probe that’s scheduled for launch in 2028. SR-1 Freedom is designed to carry a fission reactor and nuclear electric propulsion system.

Rocketdyne’s Redmond facility is working on thrusters for the system. “We built here, in Redmond, the Advanced Electric Propulsion System,” Rocketdyne CEO Kristin Houston told GeekWire before Isaacman’s talk. “It’s a 12-kilowatt Hall-thruster system, and that is going to be the propulsion element on the SR-1 Freedom. So, yeah, we’re really proud of that.”

Today’s visit was part of the Pacific Northwest leg of Isaacman’s nationwide “Inspiration Tour,” aimed at strengthening the connections between NASA and its partners. A similar tour in August brought Isaacman to Idaho National Laboratory, which will play a key role in providing the 20-kilowatt reactor for SR-1 Freedom.

In partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA is also looking into the prospects for putting a nuclear reactor on the lunar surface by 2030 as part of its Moon Base initiative. Houston said Rocketdyne is interested in playing a part in that program.

“That’s not as much out of the Redmond site, but as Rocketdyne, we’re doing a lot of investment in the power conversion and the power management and distribution design that could be used for that,” she said.

Over the course of nearly 60 years, Rocketdyne’s Redmond site has played a role in nearly every interplanetary NASA mission — and has gone through several ownership changes along the way. The company’s latest transition, including its rebranding as Rocketdyne, became official last month after AE Industrial Partners acquired a majority stake from L3Harris.

Nowadays, Rocketdyne is arguably best-known as one of the commercial partners in NASA’s Artemis moon program. “We have 21 engines on the Orion spacecraft,” Houston said. “That’s between the crew module and the service module … all built in Redmond.”

The Redmond facility oversees the refurbishment of space shuttle engines for upcoming Artemis missions and is redesigning the spacecraft’s Orion Main Engine for missions starting with Artemis 7. “Our in-space propulsion business, really based here, has the lead on the entire OME program,” Houston said. “So we’re already concurrently doing the design and test of the new engine while doing all the refurbishment.”

Isaacman said the Artemis program is one of NASA’s top priorities, in part due to geopolitical competition. The current schedule targets a crewed lunar landing in early 2028, followed by initial work on a permanent base near the moon’s south pole later that year.

“NASA is very hot,” he said. “But NASA is hot right now because we are in a great-power competition. That’s across AI, energy and infrastructure, and everything you can imagine militarily, but certainly in the domain of space. We cannot take our foot off the gas. Really, if we miss our time by a matter of months, there are only so many good parking spots in the south pole of the moon, where we want to build our moon base. Well, the Chinese want to build their moon base there, too.”

NASA is relying on Rocketdyne and other commercial partners to set a fast pace.

“For all the great companies, the partners that are contributing to our near-impossible objectives, now is absolutely the time,” Isaacman said. “Just as so many of you were probably inspired by the space race in the 1960s and what we accomplished — all those books and movies that came from it — you’re now contributing to that.”

One of the VIPs in the audience, Redmond Mayor Angela Birney, said she was energized by Isaacman’s visit. “I am so excited that Rocketdyne is on the forefront of missions in space,” she said. “For me, as a former science teacher and someone who’s so interested in encouraging innovation and development, this just feels like a fantastic day to celebrate all of that.”

Rocketdyne wasn’t Isaacman’s only scheduled stop on this week’s tour. Earlier in the week, the administrator and other federal officials paid a visit to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Castle Air Museum in California’s Central Valley. In addition to Rocketdyne, today’s visits included stopovers at United Precision Corp.’s headquarters in Washougal, Wash., Seattle’s Museum of Flight and Boeing’s Everett facility. Stoke Space is on the agenda for Friday.

After his talk, Isaacman told GeekWire that Washington state is home to a “lot of industry” that’s contributing to America’s space effort.

“It takes contributions from great talent all across the nation to contribute to our world-changing efforts,” he said, “but it just happens to be that a lot of it is here in Washington.”

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won a contract worth up to $700 million to boost NASA’s telecommunications capability in Martian orbit, using a version of the company’s Blue Ring multi-mission space platform.

The contract calls on Blue Origin to deliver a high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter to NASA by the end of 2028, the space agency said in a news release. Blue Origin would also be charged with operating the Mars telecommunications network as part of NASA’s broader space communications and navigation infrastructure.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the Blue Ring spacecraft for the mission was already in production in Huntsville, Alabama. “Before the first human steps on Mars, we have to build the road. … MTO will enable science, carry payloads, and help lay the foundation for human exploration,” he said in a post to X.

“MTO is the backbone of America’s Mars exploration program for the next decade and beyond, and will provide the reliable communications capacity that will keep future robotic and human missions connected to each other and to Earth,” Tory Bruno, president of Blue Origin’s National Security Group, said in a news release. “This awarded contract is a testament to the Blue Origin team that has been building Blue Ring with exactly this kind of mission in mind. We’re ready, and so is the hardware.”

NASA’s current telecommunications links to Mars rely on an aging set of orbiters, including Mars Odyssey (launched in 2001) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched in 2005). The multinational relay network also makes use of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. In addition to the orbiting relay satellites, NASA’s probes on the Martian surface can communicate directly with Earth to a limited degree.

Plans for a new Mars telecommunications orbiter have been under consideration for more than a decade and a half, but had been repeatedly put on hold due to budget concerns. This May, NASA issued a request for proposals relating to a commercial network for the Red Planet, drawing responses from Blue Origin as well as Rocket Lab.

Blue Origin announced three years ago that it was developing its Blue Ring in-space mobility platform for a wide range of potential applications — and last year, the first flight of the company’s New Glenn rocket included a payload that tested communications and control system for Blue Ring.

NASA said the Mars Telecommunications Network would be managed by the space agency’s Space Communications and Navigation program. The network is expected to be operational at Mars by 2030 to support current and future missions to the Red Planet.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to Tukwila, Wash.-based Juno Propulsion to support the startup’s development of a non-toxic propulsion system for in-space applications.

The two-year Phase II project, funded through NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, will be conducted in partnership with the University of Washington and UW Professor Carl Knowlen’s lab. The focus of the funding is to support work on Juno’s Product Development Unit (PDU), which uses rotating detonation rocket engine technology.

By combining high-efficiency propulsion with non-toxic propellants, Juno aims to enable spacecraft to maneuver farther and faster while reducing the risks associated with traditional toxic propellants. Work on the PDU is intended to advance Juno’s system to Technology Readiness Level 8, positioning it near production-ready status on the standard 1-to-9 TRL scale.

“This award represents an important milestone in taking our rotating detonation propulsion technology from development and flight demonstration toward a production-ready product,” Juno Propulsion CEO Alexis Harroun said in a news release. “We’re excited to continue our collaboration with the University of Washington and Professor Knowlen’s lab as we take the next step toward delivering this technology to commercial and government customers.”

The Phase II grant, announced last week, follows up on a $275,000 Phase I SBIR grant that was awarded in 2024.

Juno Propulsion’s team is getting ready for Project Iris, an on-orbit demonstration of its propulsion technology that’s due to fly aboard Momentus’ Vigoride 8 satellite platform in 2027. The lessons learned from Project Iris will feed directly into work on the PDU.

The startup was founded in 2023 by Harroun and chief technology officer Ari Martinez, who met while earning their Ph.D.s at Purdue University. Harroun received her undergraduate degree in aeronautics and astronautics from UW and interned at Blue Origin, Boeing and NASA before heading to Purdue.

In June, Juno Propulsion announced the close of a $1.4 million pre-seed financing round, led by SOSV with participation from Hypernova Fund, Leslie Ventures, Activate, Collaborative Fund, Safar Partners and Cape Fear Ventures.

A Seattle-area nonprofit group known as the Fermi Explorer Mission today unveiled its plans to send a spacecraft on an 80,000-year trip to the nearest alien star system, Alpha Centauri.

If the mission goes as planned, it would mark a milestone for interstellar flight. But Philip Johnston, the group’s co-founder and president, doesn’t expect Fermi Explorer to be humanity’s first visitor to Alpha Centauri. He’s counting on our descendants to figure out faster ways to travel between now and the year 82026.

“We’ll be the first to leave, and the last to arrive,” he said.

The robotic spacecraft won’t be powered by antimatter, dilithium crystals or other science-fiction standbys for traveling between stars. Instead, it will depend on a tried-and-true solar electric propulsion system to build up speed for the 4.4-light-year trip.

Johnston and his teammates laid out the mission requirements for a bidding process that aims to keep the cost of designing, building, launching and operating the probe below $15 million. They’re also soliciting contributions, with launch targeted by the end of 2029.

The mission is contingent on raising the required funds, but Johnston voiced confidence about hitting the $15 million target. “We have raised significant funds already, but the bulk of the raise will kick off after [today’s] announcement,” he told GeekWire in an email. “One billionaire space founder already verbally offered $10M.”

What about NASA? “We are talking with NASA, but they have a very long process for backing missions,” Johnston said. “We would love to have them involved but will complete the mission with or without them.”

Johnston and the group’s other co-founders — Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean — also founded Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which plans to launch up to 88,000 satellites to serve as AI data centers. Johnston said there is no operational overlap between the two ventures.

Program manager Garrett Jameson, a former U.S. Air Force officer, will lead day-to-day operations. “We chose Garrett to optimize for something actually being launched,” Johnston said. “Rather than getting someone from JPL or an academic background, Garrett has 10 years of experience as an Air Force officer where he delivered on many missions, including space operations. His job will be selecting vendors and ensuring they deliver.”

Ten years ago, billionaire Yuri Milner announced a $100 million initiative called Breakthrough Starshot that aimed to send a swarm of micro-spacecraft to Alpha Centauri — but that effort, backed by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg, never really got off the ground. Last year, Scientific American quoted the project’s executive director, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Pete Worden, as saying that Starshot was put on hold.

“I spoke with the former program manager there,” Johnston said. “He was trying to do it in a human lifetime. Ours is a very different mission.”

The mission plan calls for the spacecraft to deploy from its launch vehicle and then loop around Earth and the sun to build up speed through a series of perihelion pumping maneuvers. When the probe reaches the planned escape velocity, it will head out for Alpha Centauri. “We will have a 12-year operation period … and then a 79,500-year coast period,” Johnston said.

During the cruise, the probe will travel at a speed of 24.2 kilometers per second (54,000 mph). Johnston said the flight through the Alpha Centauri system will occur at a relative velocity of 17.9 km/s (40,000 mph) — roughly 25% faster than New Horizons’ Pluto flyby in 2015.

Specifications call for a minimum payload of 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) inside a shielded 10-by-10-by-10-centimeter box (4 by 4 by 4 inches). The payloads could include artistic works or scientific experiments — for example, a cosmic-ray ion detector or an interstellar dust catcher. The Fermi Explorer team plans to schedule a three-month solicitation period for such payloads, and will make their selections based on feasibility, cost and other factors.

The team plans to send a digitized and micro-etched copy of the Voyager mission’s Golden Record, plus messages from children around the world. And the project offers several ways for supporters to “make their mark” on the mission, priced from $10 for a website mention to $1 million to place an gem-sized object on the probe.

“The purpose of messages from children is to inspire the next generation,” Johnston said in his email. “Grownups can pay.😅”

There’s no plan to orbit or land on a planet. Instead, the probe will continue outward after the Alpha Centauri encounter. Johnston hopes that future interstellar travelers will intercept it. “That is how we will get the data back,” he said.

The Fermi Explorer team conducted an AI-assisted analysis to verify that the plan was technically feasible. There’s also a board of human advisers, including Rob Meyerson, CEO of Seattle-based Interlune and former president of Blue Origin; Jeff Thornburg, CEO of Bothell, Wash.-based Portal Space Systems and former head of propulsion engineering at SpaceX; AstroForge CEO Matthew Gialich; Astro Digital CEO Chris Biddy; SpaceX engineer Ashkan Borna; and Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist and inventor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Philip and I have been talking about this idea for some time, and he asked me to support him as an adviser,” Meyerson told GeekWire in an email. “I believe in Philip as a leader, and big ideas like this need to be tried. I’m happy to be involved.”

Johnston hinted that SpaceX could play a key role. “We will most likely launch on a SpaceX rideshare, but that will be up to the vendor to select,” he said. When discussing the bidding process for providing the spacecraft, Johnston said that “we already have credible bids from U.S. manufacturers who have completed hundreds of successful missions” — a description that fits SpaceX’s profile.

Will Fermi Explorer actually lift off? The next few months should tell the tale. “The mission will happen,” Johnston insisted. “There will not be a no-go.”

There’s another, even deeper question about the mission: Why do it? Everyone involved in launching the Fermi Explorer will be long gone by the time it gets to Alpha Centauri. And there’s no guarantee that it will actually get there, or that humans will ever know if it does.

The answer lies in the name. “Fermi Explorer” is a reference to the Fermi Paradox, posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950: If intelligent life is common in the universe, where is everybody? Some suggest that a “Great Filter” prevents species from expanding across the stars.

“I’m worried about the implications of the Fermi Paradox for the coming decades (i.e., are we coming up on a Great Filter),” Johnston said in his email. “I am doing the mission mainly to draw attention to the Fermi Paradox, and also to tick off a few more possible Great Filters.”

Learn more about the mission at FermiExplorer.org.

Starcloud says it has raised $250 million in new funding to support the creation of a constellation of data center satellites powered by Nvidia’s next-generation AI chips.

The Series A extension funding round was led by Manhattan West, with participation from existing investors including Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX and 776. Among the new investors joining for this round are Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital and Standard Capital.

Founded in 2024, Starcloud is headquartered in Redmond, Wash., and is building production lines for its Starcloud-3 spacecraft at a new 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Woodinville, Wash. The newly announced round brings the startup’s total capital raised to $450 million, with a post-money valuation of $2.3 billion.

Nvidia’s participation in the funding round brings Starcloud’s collaboration with the computer-chip titan to a new level. In November 2025, Starcloud flew Nvidia’s H100 GPU to orbit for the first time. It used the chip to train a large language model called NanoGPT — marking a milestone in space-based AI data processing.

Starcloud plans to equip future satellites with Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin Module, which Nvidia says will deliver 25 times as much in-space compute capability as the H100. Starcloud’s satellites will serve as an early flight platform for the space-rated chips.

“This fresh capital empowers us to build the infrastructure to launch many more of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs into space,” Starcloud co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston said today in a news release.

Starcloud says the new investment will fund the continued buildout of manufacturing capacity, engineering work in collaboration with Nvidia and the procurement of future launch slots. Manhattan West’s Lauren Selig will join Starcloud’s team as a board observer.

Starcloud has filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to operate as many as 88,000 satellites as orbital data centers for AI and other applications. It’s not the only company targeting the market for orbital data centers. Most notably, SpaceX has filed its own plans to put up to a million data center satellites in space, for a project called Starmind.

The push to move AI infrastructure into space is driven by growing terrestrial bottlenecks surrounding land, power and water consumption — and by the political controversies those bottlenecks have sparked.

BOTHELL, Wash. — Portal Space Systems is getting ready to send its first Starburst spacecraft to Florida for a milestone launch, and at the same time is fleshing out its plans for launching an even more capable spacecraft known as Supernova.

Both spacecraft are designed to offer rapid maneuverability in orbit at low cost, and both will take advantage of Portal’s core technologies, supply chains and manufacturing processes. But Supernova will be heavier than Starburst (1,100 pounds vs. 600 pounds) and will make use of an innovative solar thermal propulsion system to move within a wider range of orbits.

Seventeen months after the official opening of Portal’s 8,000-square-foot development and testing lab in Bothell, I was invited back to the facility to get a peek at Starburst-1 — and get a sense of how far the startup has come.

Starburst: Getting ready for blastoff

Starburst-1 will blaze the trail for Supernova. The desk-sized spacecraft recently returned to the Bothell lab after undergoing a round of vibration testing in California. It’s scheduled for an October launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on SpaceX’s Bandwagon-5 satellite rideshare mission.

Portal CEO Jeff Thornburg said he expected Starburst-1 to be trucked to Florida in September, after engineers make their final software adjustments.

“Until we get ready to fly, we’ll be constantly testing it and evaluating its health, and making any tweaks that we think we need to make,” he said. “Anything that helps reduce the risk for the first flight, up to the point where we launch — we’ll implement that if we need to.”

Back in March, Portal sent a payload about the size of a tissue box into space to test the electronics and control systems designed for Starburst and Supernova. That instrument package, known as “Mini-Nova,” is still attached to an orbiting space vehicle, but a replica is displayed in a conference room next to the lab.

Starburst-1 takes center stage in the lab’s clean-room enclosure. The satellite’s solar arrays are stacked on top, and several contraptions stick out from the sides. The hardware includes Starburst-1’s star trackers and communications equipment. A full-motion video system, provided by TRL11, will monitor the spacecraft and its orbital surroundings.

Here’s a slideshow featuring Portal’s lab and Starburst-1:

One of the boxes attached to Starburst-1 contains a superconducting magnet produced by Zenno, a New Zealand startup that’s in the process of moving its headquarters to Los Angeles. Theoretically, Zenno’s magnet system could be used to maneuver spacecraft in orbit by interacting with Earth’s magnetic field, and it could also serve as a radiation shield for a spacecraft’s sensitive electronics.

“It’s the Star Trek shields coming to life on the spacecraft,” Thornburg said. “That’s probably the use case I’m most excited about.”

Thornburg emphasized that testing the video system and the magnet are secondary mission objectives. The primary objective is to validate Starburst-1’s engineering design over the course of a year or more.

“Everything after a year becomes residual capability,” he said. “If all is healthy, then we’ll basically go into a stable orbit, and then we’ll re-engage this with other Portal spacecraft in the future to practice rendezvous proximity operations, and practice everything we need to refuel these spacecraft.”

By this time next year, Portal’s satellite manufacturing operation will have made the transition over to a much bigger facility in Bothell. “We have 65,000 square feet we’re moving into, just down the road about three miles, and it’ll have the capacity to produce 12 Supernova and 16 Starburst spacecraft a year,” Thornburg said.

Supernova: Putting the plans in place

Supernova will be the flagship of Portal’s highly maneuverable space fleet. It’s designed to serve as an orbital platform for payloads that have to shift to different orbits in hours or days rather than weeks or months.

Two years after emerging from stealth, Portal has attracted tens of millions of dollars in funding and Pentagon development grants. The company anticipates using Supernova for applications ranging from satellite inspection and protection to orbital trash disposal.

Today Portal announced that its first Supernova space vehicle will be launched in 2028 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. California-based Maverick Space Systems, which did the vibration testing for Starburst-1, will handle payload accommodation, integration and manifest optimization. Extra capacity on the Falcon 9 will be offered for third-party rideshare payloads.

“We’re designing an optimized payload stack for Portal, and bringing additional rideshare payloads to the mission, helping reduce launch costs for all mission partners,” Vidur Kaushish, Maverick’s chief operating officer and co-founder, said in a news release. “This new rideshare model is precisely what the industry needs. Portal’s ability to maneuver on orbit gives us the flexibility to select orbits that are truly valuable to rideshare customers.”

The key to Supernova’s rapid maneuverability is its solar thermal propulsion system, known as Flare. The system concentrates sunlight to heat up ammonia propellant in a heat exchanger, producing high-efficiency thrust without chemical combustion. Starburst also uses heated ammonia as a propellant, but in a more traditional electrothermal thruster system.

Supernova will be equipped with a battery to store heat when the spacecraft is in Earth’s shadow. “The thermal battery is a material that lives inside our heat exchanger, and it heats up and retains the heat for up to an hour,” Thornburg told me. “So, I don’t need to see the sun to be able to execute a maneuver.”

Supernova’s first mission will be called “Motus Via Sol,” meaning “Movement With the Sun.” And Portal Space Systems will be on the move as well.

“I think the timing will work out where all our future builds will be in our new facility,” Thornburg said. “I’d say in the next six to 12 months, we’ll probably have all of this capability in the new building, and then we’ll vacate this facility. But I’m not rushing engineering, because I don’t need to.”

Thornburg said it was only recently that he realized the full significance of that transition, and what it will mean for “our little mini-facility that did what it needed to do.”

“I was seeing the end of this building,” he said, “and the beginning of the next one.”

A nuclear-powered heater built by Zeno Power Systems is slated to fly to the moon aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander for a demonstration mission that could take place as early as 2028.

Zeno’s Seattle engineering hub played a leading role in developing the radioisotope heater unit, which will be powered by americium-241, a radioactive isotope typically recovered from recycled nuclear material.

The unit will provide 5 watts of thermal energy — enough to sustain the payload during the lunar night, which lasts 14 Earth days. Firefly’s first solar-powered Blue Ghost lander, which touched down on the moon in March 2025, operated successfully through the lunar day but gave up the ghost shortly after sunset.

“Our first Blue Ghost mission gave us firsthand insight into the moon’s extreme thermal environment, where we measured temperatures ranging from more than 230 degrees F during the lunar day to below -275 degrees F at night,” Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s vice president of spacecraft, said today in a news release. “Now we’re looking forward to advancing technologies that can extend missions beyond sunset and support long-duration surface operations required for NASA’s Moon Base initiative and the growing lunar economy.”

The lander will rely on solar power to run NASA-funded science payloads on the moon’s near side during the lunar day. When night falls, Zeno’s payload will go into operation and transmit data back to Earth.

“Hardware capable of surviving the extreme cold of the lunar night will be essential to enabling sustained operations on the moon,” said Tyler Bernstein, CEO and co-founder of Zeno Power. “NASA’s Moon Base program has identified the need for technologies such as radioisotope power systems to support future lunar exploration, and Zeno is proud to answer that call to demonstrate this capability aboard Firefly’s Blue Ghost mission.”

Firefly has two other lunar lander missions on its manifest: a trip to the moon’s far side scheduled for no earlier than 2027; and a mission targeting a region known as the Gruithuisen Domes, set for 2028 or later.

Beyond radioisotope heater units, Zeno is developing radioisotope power generators to supply electricity for missions on the moon and in extreme environments on Earth. “As demand for long-duration lunar infrastructure grows, we are building the production capacity to support future commercial and government missions,” Bernstein said.

In addition to its Seattle engineering hub, Zeno maintains facilities in Washington, D.C., and California. The company reported the completion of a $50 million Series B funding round in May, followed by a $3.6 million funding extension from Seraphim Space.

“Zeno has raised $105 million to date in private investment and has 95 employees,” Kelsey Bates, the company’s communications manager, told GeekWire in an email. The Seattle hub accounts for the largest proportion of those employees.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it has successfully tested the first three ground stations for a global communications network that will support the company’s missions in Earth orbit and beyond.

The Quartz network’s first ground stations are in Bermuda, New Zealand and Australia. Blue Origin says the network is due to expand to nine sites by the end of the year.

“Ground communications infrastructure has historically been one of the most fragmented and costly elements of space operations, for national security programs, civil and commercial operators alike,” Tory Bruno, president of national security at Blue Origin, said today in a news release. “With Quartz, we’ve built a single, fully integrated network that changes that equation. One interface, one operations team, transparent pricing and a security architecture built to meet the most demanding mission requirements.”

The first phase of the network buildout features 3.7-meter aperture antennas supporting S-band and X-band frequencies for operations in low Earth orbit. Future installations will feature 9-meter apertures supporting L-, S-, X- and Ka-band frequencies — which are suitable for operations in geostationary orbit as well as cislunar and deep-space missions.

To accelerate the buildout, Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin is partnering with Redmond, Wash.-based RBC Signals, an 11-year-old company that specializes in providing flexible space communications solutions.

RBC Signals is supporting site surveys, antenna procurement, deployment and hosting across the Quartz network. Once deployed, the new antennas will be integrated into RBC Signals’ Global Ground Station Network, with unused capacity made available to RBC’s other commercial customers.

“Our mission is to provide reliable, flexible and innovative communications solutions for the world’s most ambitious space operators,” RBC Signals CEO Ron Faith said in a news release. “Blue Origin’s vision for the future of space exploration aligns perfectly with our capabilities, and we look forward to supporting their missions with a resilient and globally integrated communications network.”

RBC Signals previously collaborated with AWS Ground Station on a separate ground station network designed to give satellite operators low-latency access to AWS cloud infrastructure.

“Blue Origin’s Quartz ground network is independent of the AWS Ground network (just as Blue Origin is independent of AWS),” Faith told GeekWire in an email. “RBC Signals works with multiple ground networks around the world including Blue Origin’s Quartz network as well as the AWS Ground network.”

In other developments:

• Blue Origin has begun construction of a second launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, complementing a pad that’s being rebuilt after sustaining damage in a rocket explosion in May. Launch Complex 36B will be used for the company’s beefed-up New Glenn 9×4 rockets, while New Glenn 7×2 rockets will use Launch Complex 36A.
• The anomaly that caused May’s New Glenn rocket explosion has been traced to the main oxygen valve on one of the booster’s BE-4 engines, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a posting to X. New Glenn launches have been suspended while the investigation continues. “Hope you get back to flight soon,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a reply to Limp’s post.
• Blue Origin is looking at sites in Texas and Florida for what’s said to be a $650 million, 1.3-million-square-foot facility that would be used for manufacturing, logistics and research and development, according to the Austin Business Journal. City officials in Hutto, an Austin suburb, reportedly approved a set of economic development incentives for the project.

K2 Space, a California-based satellite company that recently set up an engineering hub in Seattle, has announced a $500 million funding round at a $6.8 billion valuation.

The Series D round was led by Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ, with participation from CapitalG, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Spark Capital, Sands Capital, ARK Invest, T. Rowe Price Associates and other existing investors.

Since its founding in 2022, K2 Space has raised more than $1 billion in capital and secured an equivalent amount in contracts.

While many satellite companies focus on miniaturization, K2 Space is going big on satellite mass and power. K2 had its first “mega-class” satellite, dubbed Gravitas, launched into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in March. The two-ton, 20-kilowatt satellite carried a dozen undisclosed payload modules for multiple customers, including the Department of Defense.

K2 is working with commercial satellite provider SES on spacecraft for its “meoSphere” network; with Anduril Industries on satellites for the Golden Dome missile defense system; and with the U.S. Space Force on its Protected Tactical Satcom-Global program.

Karan Kunjur, co-founder and CEO of K2 Space, said the new capital validates the company’s core strategy.

“When my brother Neel and I started K2 four years ago, we took a contrarian bet that building bigger would be the future for exploring and developing space,” Kunjur said today in a news release. “This latest round validates that thesis and gives us the capital to accelerate scaling as we prepare to build up to 100 large satellites per year.”

Seattle-based Interlune is expanding its partnership with Vermeer, an Iowa-based industrial equipment manufacturer, to develop construction tools for use on the moon.

The two companies forged their initial strategic partnership to further Interlune’s plans to extract helium-3 from tons of moon dirt and rocks, also known as regolith. Their full-scale prototype of a lunar excavator was unveiled a little more than a year ago.

At the time, Interlune was focused on mining helium-3 and bringing it back to Earth for applications ranging from quantum computing to medical imaging and nuclear fusion. But a major shift came in March when NASA announced a 10-year, $30 billion initiative to build the infrastructure for a moon base.

Interlune co-founder and CEO Rob Meyerson said he and his teammates realized that the partnership with Vermeer could support NASA’s plans. “We went back to Vermeer … and we decided that it made sense to formally expand the partnership to focus on all these other things that we’ve had in mind,” Meyerson told GeekWire.

For example, a lunar construction project is likely to involve building roads, compacting surfaces, digging trenches for underground utilities and moving rocks to clear space for a habitat. Heavy equipment might be needed to build protective berms around nuclear reactors.

Vermeer’s president and CEO, Jason Andringa, said he’s up for the challenge. He noted that before taking charge of the business his grandfather founded nearly 80 years ago, he was a staff engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“When I left NASA and came to work for Vermeer, my hope always was to be able to re-merge my passion for aerospace, specifically for the human exploration and human colonization of the moon and Mars, with my coming back to my family business … and use what I knew Vermeer was best at on Earth to do important work on the moon and Mars,” he told GeekWire.

Interlune is already working with the Colorado School of Mines on the design of an implement that could be used to dig trenches or excavate lunar soil, under the terms of a $150,000 NASA contract that was awarded earlier this year. Meyerson said the Vermeer partnership will take such projects to the next level.

“We want to really formalize the partnership so that we can start to think beyond prototypes, and think about sustainable operations, systems that are resilient to the environment,” he said. “That is what Interlune and Vermeer bring together as a team.”

Interlune will work with Vermeer to build a demonstration tool that could be put on a lunar vehicle and sent to the moon in 2028 or 2029. “It is going to be something around leveling, rock removal and compaction,” Meyerson said. “That will be the priority for the first one.”

That timeline aligns with NASA’s plans to send Lunar Terrain Vehicles, or LTVs, to the moon for the Artemis 5 mission, which is currently set for launch in late 2028.

Andringa said Vermeer would follow Interlune’s lead on the requirements for a lunar site preparation tool. “It would most likely involve what we call surface mining, which is a big drum attachment on a machine that basically mills out a level of the very top part of the regolith, and then it could be compacted,” he said. “Depending on the exact location on the moon and the exact properties of the material, you might just need to go over it with the drum one time.”

Over the longer term, Interlune and Vermeer would add to the toolkit. “Sometime in the future, you may have a specific-purpose machine that the two companies put together, that is specially designed just for that industrial operation, rather than the missions that NASA has in mind for the LTV,” Meyerson said.

In the meantime, Interlune is continuing work on its helium-3 mining initiative. The company’s first space mission, known as Crescent Moon, involves sending a multispectral camera to the lunar surface later this year. The camera is designed to estimate how much helium-3 is present in the soil around the landing site.

Interlune’s second mission, Prospect Moon, recently received $6.9 million in NASA funding for design and development. That mission is currently due for launch in 2028 and will test methods for extracting helium-3 and hydrogen from lunar regolith.

“We have the team in place, and things are going well,” Meyerson said. “We’re ticking through all of our milestones with the NASA team.”

Meanwhile, Vermeer is pursuing a separate partnership with Texas-based Astroport Space Technologies, which is developing its own suite of robotic systems for lunar construction projects. “Interlune and Astroport are aware of each other, and both of them feel as though there’s going to be plenty of work to go around,” Andringa said.

Andringa emphasized that the work on lunar construction equipment makes up just a small percentage of what Vermeer does. About 10 of Vermeer’s 4,500 employees are working on moon projects, and even those employees have other projects in their portfolio, he said.

Nevertheless, Andringa acknowledged that there’s something inspirational about extending the company’s reach beyond Earth. “It’s always going to be a small part of Vermeer, but it’s going to be a super-engaging, motivating, fun, stimulating, challenging part of Vermeer,” he said. “And you know what? What we learn to build stuff and fly stuff and operate stuff on the moon is just going to make us even better at the job sites where Vermeer machines work on Earth. That’s the reason we’re doing it.”

Sophia Space has secured a patent for a technology that could pave the way for solar-powered orbital data centers that passively radiate excess heat into space.

Developed in partnership with Caltech, Sophia’s architecture tackles a major hurdle in orbital computing: how to cool thousands of chips running artificial intelligence applications in space.

Traditional designs rely on satellite-wide radiator systems with heat pumps and circulating fluids. In contrast, Sophia plans to build flat, modular tiles equipped with four processors each. The tiles draw power from solar cells on their sunlit side, and shed heat into the cold vacuum of space from their dark side.

This approach avoids having to put a cooling system in the central bus of every satellite, said Leon Alkalai, Sophia Space’s co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer. “I think you will find in time that our approach is much more favorable when we scale to larger wattage systems, because bringing everything into a bus can only be done until a certain level, and then it becomes almost impossible to do,” he told GeekWire. “Our benefit is really scalability.”

An added benefit of the satellite design is that each tile is powered independently. “The connectivity between the tiles is with fiber optic connectors,” Alkalai said. “Only data is shared. No power, no thermal, no copper wires. It’s just fiber optic links.”

Alkalai and his team came up with a fitting acronym for the design of the modules: TILE, which stands for Thermal Integrated LEO Edge. (LEO stands for “low Earth orbit.”)

How it all began

Alkalai founded Sophia Space after he finished up a 32-year career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and transitioned to the space startup world in 2021. The company is headquartered in Pasadena, Calif., but also has corporate connections to Seattle. This week, Alkalai was one of the featured speakers for Seattle Tech Week.

The TILE approach to orbital electronics came out of a Caltech research project that initially focused on space solar power systems.

“That was before 2022, when ChatGPT was announced,” Alkalai said. “Once that happened, within a year, all hell broke loose in the data center world, saying we need a thousand times more energy to power AI — and our reason to exist just skyrocketed.”

Putting data centers in orbit would get around some of the problems associated with terrestrial data centers — for example, the mushrooming requirements for real estate and the huge drain on electrical grids. But the cooling issue has loomed as a key impediment for orbital computing.

Alkalai said the “eureka moment” came when he and his fellow researchers came up with a way to balance out the solar power absorbed by the front of the tile, the power requirements for the processing chips, and the heat radiating out the back. “We did the basic math and said, ‘Oh my God, this can work,'” he recalled.

The patent application for “Space-Based Data Centers” was filed in October 2024, and the patent was granted to Sophia Space and Caltech on July 14. In addition to Alkalai, six other members of the team are listed as inventors: John Brophy, Jonathan Sauder, Timothy McElrath and Douglas Sheldon at JPL; Sergio Pellegrino at Caltech; and Don Hunter, a JPL retiree.

In a news release, Brophy said the TILE architecture “was developed as part of JPL’s mission to address challenges of national significance by applying unique JPL talent.”

“This is an illustration of how JPL, Caltech and private industry can work together to rapidly develop solutions to difficult technical problems for the benefit of the nation,” he said.

Where it’s all going

Alkalai said his fellow inventors will share in the fruits of the patent. “All of them are involved in Sophia, and they have equity in the company,” he said. “And with Caltech, we’ve signed a contract to continue doing research with Sergio Pellegrino and his students. … We are continuing this effort with the original inventors. They are consulting and are equity holders of Sophia.”

The development timeline calls for Sophia to fly its first technology demonstrator next year. “We’ve announced that we are partnering with Apex satellites,” Alkalai said. “We’re using their Nova bus … and that will be the first-ever tech demo of a tile with four GPUs.”

Alkalai said Sophia Space plans to start selling TILE systems and related components to customers in 2028, and start testing the system’s capabilities with a constellation of four to six satellites in the 2029-2030 time frame.

“What that will do is demonstrate the end-to-end system,” he said. “Then, in the new decade, we can scale up to larger numbers in the constellation, larger numbers of tiles, and so on.”

Alkalai said obtaining the newly issued patent is part of Sophia’s plan to build up a strong portfolio of intellectual property.

“If anybody wants to license or use our TILE and use our scalable approach, we could turn that into a business,” he said. “Protecting your IP is not only to deny, it’s also to enable. And I see it more as the latter. Why would somebody fight it? They could license it, and we could make this applicable all over the world.”

Alkalai said the orbital data centers that are being planned by other companies — for example, SpaceX’s ambitious Starmind network and the satellite constellation envisioned by Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud — don’t appear to be designed to take advantage of passive cooling and would thus raise no questions of infringement on Sophia Space’s patent. But he suspects that the TILE architecture will eventually become the standard for orbital data centers.

“I’ve been on this quest for five years, and I really feel very, very good about this particular topic, because I think it’s of benefit to humanity,” Alkalai said. “This is not just a money issue, or about benefits to me or my team. I just think this is a good direction for humanity as we evolve into a space economy.”

The road to space isn’t always a straight line. Sometimes, the itinerary for a career in the space industry begins with years of experience in other tech fields. And sometimes, it starts at an espresso stand.

“I actually started as a barista at SpaceX, and I somehow got recruited to go build Starlink satellites,” Kayla VanderPutten, a technical recruiter at Anduril Industries, said Monday at a downtown Seattle Tech Week session focusing on the intersection of space and technology. “I don’t know why they let me do that, but I was there for the first 500 satellites before I transitioned into recruiting.”

Over the course of 25 years, Joydeep Hazra’s career path took him through a series of jobs in telecommunications and network engineering, including management positions at Nokia, Mavenir and TRIDENTX. Now he’s the manager of a federally funded program focusing on electric vehicles at South Seattle College — and he’s getting involved in aerospace as well.

Last week, South Seattle College and the nonprofit Mars Society announced a partnership to build a space research station on campus, complete with a habitat that can be used for simulating missions on the moon or Mars.

The electric vehicle program could help students prepare for careers building Mars rovers, like the Chinese-built prototype rover that Hazra displayed during the Seattle Tech Week session.

Other technical fields could provide further opportunities for space-centric crossovers.

“When you’re building a lunar habitat, there are a lot more things to do than just going up and down in the rocket, and that’s where all of us count,” Hazra said. “Interoperability, frequencies, microgrids, plumbing, psychology, cooking — everything is going to be super-important, because without that, the lunar habitat would only have robots from China, and not our astronauts.”

South Seattle College isn’t the only Seattle-area school expanding into the final frontier: Two years ago, Amazon Leo (formerly known as Project Kuiper) partnered with Lake Washington Institute of Technology in Kirkland to launch a certification program for satellite technicians. Amazon also offers a Career Choice program that gives non-technical employees, such as workers in fulfillment centers, the opportunity to train for satellite manufacturing jobs.

VanderPutten’s career followed a less formal path. While she made coffee for the engineers at SpaceX, she also made conversation about the satellites they were building — and eventually jumped at the opportunity to join them.

“When you’re trying to build 10 satellites a day, it has to be really, really easy to do,” she said. “Once I moved onto the floor, the engineers really wanted my feedback, and I really enjoyed that. I don’t know if they always enjoyed my feedback, because it sometimes created more work for them. But that was probably the biggest surprise — being brand new and having these really talented engineers want my feedback, and want to help improve their designs based on what I was seeing.”

From there, she transitioned into recruiting for tech ventures. In June, she started a new job at Anduril, a defense tech company that’s rapidly expanding in Seattle. So, as a recruiter, what would she tell someone who’s not highly technical but is interested in the space industry?

“I would tell new grads and people who are junior in their careers to be curious, to learn how everything works together, and to ask questions,” she said. “You might feel that your question is silly or dumb, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself. But I can guarantee you that someone else in that room is going to have that question, and now you can go on and help other people.”

Amazon Leo has asked the Federal Communications Commission to approve its plan to launch up to 5,105 satellites capable of providing space-based connectivity for mobile devices.

“Our plan is to start deploying in 2028, and we’re excited to work with partners to make it happen,” Chris Weber, vice president of business and product for Amazon Leo, said on X.

The direct-to-device network, Amazon Leo D2D, would complement Amazon’s satellite network for high-speed internet service via fixed antennas. It would also leverage the existing direct-to-device network operated by Globalstar, which is in the midst of a merger with Amazon.

So far, more than 390 Amazon Leo satellites have been launched into low Earth orbit, and Amazon says it plans to start rolling out commercial service later this year. The company plans to have 3,232 first-generation satellites in orbit by mid-2029, and the FCC has already given the go-ahead for more than 4,500 second-generation satellites that would give an extra boost to network coverage.

This latest move, which was expected ever since the plans for acquiring Globalstar were announced in April, aims to capitalize on the growing interest in direct-to-device connectivity.

“In the large parts of the world where mobile phones serve as the primary means of internet connection, the Leo D2D System will give customers greater speed and throughput to expand what they can accomplish today,” Amazon said in a news release. “The system is designed to reach any compatible mobile device — including any of the growing number of smartphones from major manufacturers that have satellite-capable chipsets built in.”

In addition to services for individual users, direct-to-device service can provide uninterrupted communications for disaster response, global fleet management, remote operations across worksites and supply chains, and connectivity for remote sensors, Amazon said.

Globalstar’s network already supports emergency SOS, dead-zone texting and roadside assistance for compatible iPhones and Apple Watch models, and Amazon said it would collaborate with Apple on future satellite services using the expanded network.

The FCC application calls for deploying satellites in five orbital shells, ranging in altitude from 510 to 580 kilometers (317 to 360 miles). The satellites would communicate with each other via optical laser links, with mobile devices using L-band and S-band radio frequencies, and with Amazon ground stations via Ka-band and V-band frequencies.

Amazon Leo has already announced partnerships with telecom operators including Vodafone, DirecTV, Herotel and Australia’s National Broadband Network. Amazon said its D2D service would help those partners fill in their coverage gaps.

Direct-to-device is an emerging frontier in connectivity, but that frontier is already starting to get crowded. SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile network is currently leading the pack, in partnership with T-Mobile and other telecom operators around the world. Other players include AST SpaceMobile, Orbcomm, Viasat, Lynk Global and Iridium.

In its application, Amazon pledged that its network would be structured to minimize interference with other networks.