An explosion of wireless communications and expansion of internet connectivity is creating a new space age. Analysts predict huge growth in spacecraft over the next decade. In the 60 years since the landmark launch of Sputnik, approximately 7,000 satellites have been put into orbit around Earth. In the next five years, plans call for the launch of more than 30,000, according to company filings with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. Much of that is driven by technology companies like SpaceX and Amazon, which want to put constellations of satellites into low-earth orbit – up to 1,200 miles above the planet - to keep up with demand for ubiquitous communications. Amazon’s Project Kuiper, for example, will launch 3,236 small satellites arrayed at three orbital altitudes.

To meet that growing demand, the satellite industry is undergoing a revolution, moving to higher-volume, more automated and faster manufacturing. Apollo Fusion is playing a key role in that revolution. The startup was co-founded by Mike Cassidy, the former Google vice president that led Google’s high-altitude balloon telecommunications system - Project Loon. Apollo Fusion has designed an electric propulsion system using Hall thrusters. Unlike traditional rockets that burn chemical fuel to produce thrust, Hall thrusters typically operate with inert gases like Krypton or Xenon as a propellant. Energy stored in a battery or generated through solar panels on the spacecraft is sent to the Hall thruster and used to ionize that gas and create a plasma discharge that produces thrust. The system requires much less fuel and is much more energy efficient than chemical rockets because the plasma discharge accelerates the propellant to very high velocities—the expelled gas ions exceed speeds of 10km/s!

Challenge two

A second challenge was improving the accuracy and reliability of data acquisition. Testing simulates the many years that satellites spend orbiting the earth. That means running the thrusters for thousands of hours, turning them off and on, and repeatedly running them through all their paces. These tests are not only time-consuming but expensive, so test data must be captured accurately and reliably. The versions of various tests need to be recorded and archived for documentation. If something goes wrong in the 999nth hour of a 1000-hour test, you don’t want to lose all that data.

The value of JKI’s expertise was especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic. JKI’s software allowed Apollo Fusion to continue laboratory testing remotely while safely adhering to the shelter-in-place and social distancing orders in place during the crisis. As Hopkins puts it “You guys are life experiment savers!”