At no point before reaching NewOrbit’s office in Reading, a large town 36 miles west of London, does it feel like you’re going to a space company.
First there's a 25-minute walk from Reading's train station which takes you along a charming riverbank and past a swan who looks ready to fight. Soon you're among houses and frantically checking Google Maps. If you see a used furniture shop called The Office Chair Man, you’ve gone too far; double back a block and you'll discover NewOrbit in a tiny business estate.
Inside an unassuming office are 22 brains building something entirely new: a satellite that can survive in an untapped bit of space real estate called ‘ultra low Earth orbit’ (others call this zone ‘very low Earth orbit’: suffice to say, it’s low). NewOrbit aims to fly 180-220kms above the Earth's surface, a third of the altitude of conventional satellites and around half the altitude of the International Space Station.
This sky skimming technology could have big implications for the quality of pictures we get from space — of strong interest for militaries but also for anyone hoping to gather intel on disasters or human rights abuses — and other benefits, like faster internet.
Why are there no satellites in this part of space? Atmospheric drag, sometimes called air resistance, kills spacecraft momentum and the tug of gravity drags things towards the ground. This is not a big issue higher in space: spacecraft above the Earth's atmosphere require little or no propulsion to stay up, as air has buggered off at this height.
“No one flies in the space between planes and 400kms above the Earth’s surface,” cofounder and CEO Anatolii Papulov tells me. “We can break that barrier.”
My kingdom for a paper towel
It’s a hot day in June when I visit so I'm banking on time in the loo to dab my forehead with paper towels. Instead, Papulov immediately introduces me to the whole team. There are people in the room who've worked at Airbus and for Formula 1 teams; one person worked on the Mars rovers, another helped SpaceX rockets land.
I’m intimidated by the CVs and aware that I’m expected to ask a smart question about space. Instead, what I offer: how did Papulov convince you all to move to Reading? "Actually I live in London," one of the team replies. Being not-terribly-far from the capital has been useful for recruitment, Papulov confirms.
Moving to the kitchen, and after a glorious forehead dabbing moment, I clock many board games: this is how space people unwind. I also register a white board with scribbled equations in the kitchen: clearly inspiration strikes sometimes when you’re standing by the bins.
The physics of getting a satellite to stay in the nearest bit of space, right on the edge of Earth's atmosphere, seems so difficult that I have to ask: what’s the point? Avoiding the traffic jam of the loftier bits of space is one reason, says Papulov. There are currently about 10k active satellites in “low earth orbit”; some 70% of which are from the Elon Musk-owned company Starlink. Musk plans to eventually have as many as 40k satellites in orbit.
The risk of collisions grows with every launch. According to NASA, there are 28k pieces of debris in low Earth orbit that are larger than a tennis ball, 500k pieces roughly the size of a marble and 100m about the size of a pea: all dangerous when travelling at 17.5k miles per hour. Every chat about satellites gets onto the Kessler Syndrome, which is the idea that space junk could eventually bash off enough things to cause a catastrophic cascade of debris. “This would be like the aftermath of a nuclear war. If it happens, the orbit becomes unusable,” Xavier Lobao Pujolar, the head of the European Space Agency’s future projects division, tells me over the phone.
Aside from avoiding the hurly burly of low earth orbit, building satellites that skim the top of Earth's atmosphere has other benefits; including sharper photos (“we can triple the resolution”) which will be of interest to governments, insurance companies and farmers, among others, and faster space internet services (Starlink satellites, for example, beam internet to receivers on the ground; lower orbiting satellites should be able to beam the internet straight to your phone). “There’s a lot of interest in this technology too from the intelligence, military-side,” says Pujolar.
Some may find this close overhead surveillance potentially alarming, but Papulov says the tech will give us a clearer view on fighting disasters and saving lives. He tells me a story of a satellite built by US company Maxar Technologies, which costs around $1bn. “This satellite was able to take a picture of a fishing vessel in 2015 and the image was so sharp that it proved there were enslaved people on board. One picture rescued 2k people. And we thought, if we could bring the cost of this satellite down 100x, it would be huge.”
So far, NewOrbit has raised $9.3m from Yes.VC, Atlantic Labs and Lifeline Ventures; Rafal Modrzewski, the cofounder of Finland’s Iceye, which deploys radar satellites that collect images of the surface of the Earth at any time of day, has also chipped in. NewOrbit’s technology “could well be the biggest breakthrough since the introduction of reusable rockets by SpaceX,” says Daniel Niemi, partner at Atlantic Labs.
A small handful of other companies aim to fly in lower orbits. The furthest along is US-based Albedo Space, which has pulled in some $130m in funding to date. This company, backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, wants to build up to 24 satellites, with the aim of making 10cm images of nearly anywhere on Earth. Its satellites are designed to fly at around 320km, lower than anyone else’s: that is, until NewOrbit launches. “We will announce a date later this year,” says Papulov.
‘A lot of world firsts’
Time to check out the science and engineering stuff in the basement. NewOrbit’s idea to compensate for drag is what the company calls an air breathing propulsion system, which harvests air and uses it to make propellant. This constant level of thrust is supposed to counteract the drag of the atmosphere. Papulov expects his satellites will last, on average, for about five years.
A prototype is undergoing tests in a custom-made vacuum chamber, which simulates the pressure of space. One of the team flips a few switches and through the chamber window I see a crisp beam from the backend of a thruster. Countless hours of careful tinkering made this possible. “There are a lot of world firsts happening in there,” says Papulov.
NewOrbit’s satellite will be subjected to the friction of a thicker atmosphere, which creates challenges for every bit of the spacecraft. I’m shown a small panel of electronics: it’s quite a task to build something that’s able to withstand all the heat of a satellite and corrosive oxygen outside. “We’ve cooked a lot of electronics along the way,” says Juan Manuel Arteaga Sáenz, one of the company’s electrical engineers.
My brain’s a bit cooked too from all the technical detail. The company’s chief of staff, Alexander Kiermeier, shows me out. He joined NewOrbit after he decided his last job, at Tesla’s German office, “had got too corporate.” He has the widest smile as he looks around the plain business park. “This really has something.”
