Arcturus Mission Update

In April we launched our first commercial satellite, Arcturus, to provide dedicated internet in the US State of Alaska through our customer Pacific Dataport. Over more than two months we commissioned the satellite and prepared to begin service — we maneuvered the satellite into its orbital slot, turned on the payload at full power, and began demonstrating end-to-end connectivity to remote sites in Alaska. The satellite worked beautifully.

It turns out space continues to be hard. Arcturus abruptly experienced an anomaly with a vendor-supplied component called the solar array drive assembly (SADA). The solar array drives rotate the solar arrays to make sure they’re always pointed at the sun, and an issue with that component can mean the satellite cannot maintain full power to the payload 24/7. The Astranis engineering team has been doing an incredible job working around the clock to troubleshoot the issue. We have now reproduced the problem on the ground in a vacuum chamber, zeroed in on the exact source of the failure, and know how to fix it for future spacecraft. Because this failure occurred within the internal workings of a component supplied by an external vendor, we’re not in a position to go into the full technical details. But what we can say is we know exactly how to quickly solve this issue on future spacecraft that are in production as we speak.

This is a frustrating situation — the Arcturus spacecraft is in a safe state and fully under our control, the payload and our other Astranis in-house designed components are all working perfectly, and the tanks are fueled for years of on-orbit operation. But unless something major changes, the mission of providing internet connectivity in Alaska will be delayed.

A rapidly launched spare

We are moving forward with a backup plan and this plan is unique in our industry — it involves a special, multipurpose satellite that can operate as an on-orbit spare and bridge us to a full replacement satellite. We call this satellite UtilitySat. It can operate anywhere in the world, on multiple frequency bands, with the flexibility of a software-defined satellite. UtilitySat has been in the works for over a year, is in the final stages of integration, and is manifested on our very next launch that will take place at the end of this year.

From day one, Astranis set out to be a different kind of satellite operator. We have long held the belief that the industry needed spare or backup satellites to mitigate the risk of on-orbit failures and limit the impact on the end customers. UtilitySat was designed from the beginning with backup missions and bridge capacity in mind. We were hoping to never have to use it for such a purpose, but are quite happy now that we have it. Unlike with a traditional large GEO satellite, where an on-orbit anomaly could mean a gap of many years and a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars before a replacement satellite can be deployed, a spare satellite of the type we are building at Astranis can be brought in on incredibly short notice. We’re proud of what we’ve built with UtilitySat, and what it means for the future of our industry.

While this is of course disappointing, we believe we have a path forward that only Astranis could provide. We take our mission seriously, and are committed to providing broadband internet to some of the most remote and underserved areas of the globe.

Space is hard

We knew that we would learn a lot with this first mission. Issues with a first-of-its-kind aerospace vehicle are not the exception, they are the norm. All of the Astranis-designed components of the satellite are working flawlessly — a testament to the team and the innovative way we operate as a company. We’re also demonstrating the ability to rapidly resolve issues and roll the right fixes into future satellites with very little delay, something that would normally take years in traditional aerospace.

The strength of the Astranis model is that we are able to quickly respond to changing conditions on the ground and in space. Arcturus is still a very capable satellite with years of on-orbit life remaining. It will be repurposed for secondary missions like on-orbit technology demonstrations.

Our satellites are smaller and more flexible, and we build them faster and in higher quantities, than those of traditional satellite manufacturers. That means a setback worst-case becomes a delay in the start of service, not an end to the mission. Our team is already hard at work to make that delay as short as possible for the people of Alaska.

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