The idea is to make launching stuff into space .
That, anyway, is the direction of the space industry, whose actors have been focused on lowering prices and barriers to access. SpaceX currently charges around $1,200 per pound (€2,470 per kilo) of payload to blast something of yours into orbit, which might sound expensive but it’s a mere fraction of what NASA used to charge: $30,000 per pound.
But while payload prices have dropped, the cost of building a satellite remains high. That’s the problem that SPiN, a Luxembourg startup, hopes to address.
In 2014, SPiN’s future cofounder and CEO Ran Qedar was helping to build a satellite system as part of his university studies. It took three months to design the complex algorithms needed for advanced navigation and control, i.e. the software—but another whole year to integrate that software into the satellite.
“Because, we discovered, there’s no Windows or Linux operating system for satellites,” he explains. “You can’t afford the risks—you can’t afford to have Windows crashing in space, or the complexity of Linux where you have multiple parts that are open-source and where you don’t know their validity or how well they work.”
As a result, most companies were, and are, designing these systems from scratch, a lengthy and expensive process.
At around the same time, however, Qedar found a video where the US Air Force accomplished the software/satellite integration in an unthinkably swift four hours, and all the way back in 2008. This inspired him, but it turned out that years of design and gigantic sums of money were spent just to make that plug-and-play moment possible.
Says Qedar: “And we thought: how do we get to the same result of four hours, but not spend a billion dollars and decades of verifying, qualifying and sending everything back into space to make sure it works?”
“And this is when we decided to develop an adapter.”
Qedar and his colleagues set up in Luxembourg because of its space sector. “We believe that Luxembourg has the highest number of space startups per… small area,” he says. Photo: SPiN
Risk-free software
The CEO likens SPiN’s adapter to a plug converter that you might take on international trips. On the hardwire side, it has over 25 different ports and eight interfaces. On the software side, the communication layer of the product “talks” to the hardware the way an operating system like Windows would talk to a computer.
“But the difference,” he says, “is that we had to devise software that is risk-free. We measure our times in microseconds—any time delay in a satellite that flies at 27,000 kilometres per hour is a big issue.”
Another priority was to make the system highly configurable, such that new protocols can be added without software updates.
SPiN made its first sale in 2018, three years after winning a startup competition in Bremen. The team participated in Luxembourg’s Fit4Start programme in 2021, with the aim of building a satellite using its own adapter, both as a proof of concept and to show prospective customers that it could do the implementation too.
That satellite, dubbed SPiN-1, will be launched on a SpaceX rocket on 25 May.
Ultimately, says Qedar, the company’s vision is to enable people to assemble their own satellites using whatever parts and technology they need or have—including heritage technologies—“and really to have this kind of Lego concept of building satellites”.
He estimates that accessibility to space, in more widespread and concrete terms, will become a reality for the average company in about two years’ time.