Orbital Arc Corporation

Building satellites costs too much - the hardware, fuel, and launch cost of a 200 kg satellite (roughly the mass of a motorcycle) is typically $5-10M. Much of the cost is propulsion, where companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on solar arrays, power supplies, fuel, fuel tanks, and thrusters, only to get the same Hall Thruster technology we've been using and micro-optimizing for over two decades. Orbital Arc changes this - our Gas FEEP thruster is the first of its kind, offering better thrust performance with 10x less mass, 45% higher fuel efficiency, and 2000x cheaper fuel. This single system change can cut $635k and 19 kg from the build cost and mass of that 200 kg satellite, with the benefit only getting bigger as mission scales increase - that's immediate value for satellite constellation builders. Long run, this innovation closes the economic cases for numerous in-space industrial operations, from mining near earth objects for platinum, to producing semiconductor materials at scale in low earth orbit.

With only Techstars as invested capital, we've built a working physics demonstration prototype of our thruster which outperformed prior work from MIT post-docs and professors by 152,000x (on our first attempt!), achieving TRL 3, ionizing our target fuel in our target environment with our target MEMS chip geometry. To achieve this, we had to secure US Department of Energy support, as well as access to cleanroom chip fab laboratories at Rice University, UT Austin, and Oak Ridge National Lab. The solo founder taught himself plasma physics, rocket science, and a bit of quantum mechanics to design and model the system, and then taught himself nanomaterials science and semiconductor fabrication to personally go into the labs and build a MEMS chip himself (with lots of help and guidance from advisors and Oak Ridge staff scientists).

It worked, the very first time he turned it on.