listed shares on Nasdaq earlier this month<\/a> in an initial public offering that delivered a windfall for many current and former employees.<\/p>\n\u201cLike a lot of early SpaceX employees, I held equity, and the IPO was good to me,\u201d he told SpaceNews via email.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut Eclipse isn\u2019t a self-funded venture,\u201d he added, pointing to undisclosed external investments led by early-stage investors such as Space Capital, Tectonic and Ubiquity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are well capitalized to execute on our roadmap, including the hardware we are delivering this year and the demonstration mission,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not breaking out specific figures at this stage, but we will have more to say on funding before long.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eclipse was cofounded by Kyle Leveque, who also cofounded Aquila Space, a remote sensing satellite maker now part of Astro Digital.<\/p>\n
Adapting the Starlink playbook<\/p>\n
Around half of Eclipse\u2019s roughly 30 employees joined from Starlink, Huerta said, with 13 having been part of the earliest days of the broadband constellation when it was known as Satellite Development.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur people developed Starlink\u2019s phased arrays and built the supply chain that took them from prototypes to dozens of satellites a week,\u201d Huerta said, as well as the power systems, software, modems and other manufacturing processes tied to Falcon 9\u2019s record launch cadence.<\/p>\n
\u201cBetween us we\u2019ve taken nearly every subsystem of a modern megaconstellation from a whiteboard to mass production,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
With more than 10,000 Starlinks in low Earth orbit, he said SpaceX has shown how satellites can be mass-produced at previously unimaginable scale and cost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the more we lived inside that, the more one thing became clear,\u201d Huerta continued. \u201cThe world was heading toward a future with a handful of these networks, all owned by a few companies and a couple of governments, and everyone else, most of the planet, would simply rent access on someone else\u2019s terms, with someone else\u2019s hand on the switch.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat didn\u2019t sit right with us. Space has become critical national infrastructure, as essential as a power grid or a telecom network. Countries don\u2019t rent their power grids. But most of the world is on track to never own its space infrastructure, because until now the only options were renting from a foreign operator or paying more than many nations could justify to build it alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alongside commercial customers seeking proprietary connectivity and other satellite services, Eclipse is targeting governments that have been priced out of owning space infrastructure.<\/p>\n
According to Huerta, these countries currently have few alternatives outside China for developing an end-to-end space network.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that the only real alternative right now is China is exactly why this matters,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want America to cede its soft power in space to China, and we\u2019re part of the answer to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence boost<\/p>\n
To accelerate satellite design and engineering, Eclipse has acquired the engineering team behind Agent Studio, an AI development platform from technology firm Rendered.ai, along with an exclusive license to develop the software and an option to later buy the underlying technology.<\/p>\n
Huerta said the deal gives Eclipse an in-house AI engineering team to build tools alongside its satellite, mechanical, electrical and radio frequency engineers.<\/p>\n
Eclipse is already using the platform and tools built on it across its engineering efforts, including its debut spacecraft.<\/p>\n
Using a bus under 100 kilograms, the demonstration satellite is designed to validate key technologies before Eclipse moves to a larger, operational \u201cStarlink-class\u201d model.<\/p>\n
While the demonstrator will not include a phased array Eclipse plans to add to operational spacecraft, it is designed to put the bus to work with two in-house-built instruments: a total-ionizing-dose sensor to measure the radiation environment and a Langmuir probe to characterize the local plasma.<\/p>\n
Huerta said operational Eclipse satellites would feature dual S-band phased arrays, E-band backhaul, V-band inter-satellite links and eight kilowatts of power, with more than 20 designed to stack on a single Falcon 9 for launch.<\/p>\n
He said Eclipse is initially targeting direct-to-device services, in part because tackling one of the hardest engineering challenges in satellite communications forces the venture to develop core technologies it could later apply to broadband and other capabilities, including orbital data centers.<\/p>\n
Eclipse sees a future where every nation, along with most major enterprises, will want its own constellation as satellite networks become increasingly critical infrastructure.<\/p>\n
However, according to Huerta, meeting much of that demand at prices that make sovereign ownership realistic will not be possible through traditional in-house vertical integration.<\/p>\n
\u201cVertical integration was the right answer for SpaceX\u2019s specific problem,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt isn\u2019t the right answer for a world where every government and enterprise wants a constellation of its own.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 Former SpaceX engineers who helped build and scale Starlink have launched a startup aiming to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":727291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[312827,79,722,193,1513,5408],"class_list":["post-727290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-eclipse-space","tag-science","tag-sn","tag-space","tag-spacex","tag-starlink"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=727290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/727291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}