With new venture money, new defense contracts, and a satellite design that can offer astounding power levels in a single launch, Los Angeles-based K2 Space is hastening its ascent to orbit.
In a recent interview, the business is making what cofounder and CEO Karan Kunjur called a “pretty significant contrarian bet against the market.” The wager assumes that the cost per kilogram of mass calculus governs the space industry. The economic cost of mass is impacted by the design of spacecraft, the assessment of scientific missions, and even the planning of entire enterprises.
Although technologies, including SpaceX’s Groundbreaking work in rocket reusability, have reduced the cost per kilogram of mass, designers of spacecraft and missions still have to contend with severe mass restrictions. As a result, spacecraft have become more compact, lighter, and smaller. However, considerable power, payload mass, and payload volume trade-offs are involved.
Moving in the other direction is K2 Space. The business came out of hiding in March with big intentions to design and construct enormous satellite buses at previously unheard-of prices. According to their theory, next-generation launch vehicles like SpaceX’s Starship will radically alter the cost-per-kilogram paradigm that an iron grip has long governed. Still, to benefit from this future, we must begin preparations now.
The company is developing two satellite buses: the smaller Mega satellite, which can carry one ton of payload and launch on existing launch vehicles, and the much bigger Giga satellite, which can carry up to 15 tons of cargo and is designed for extremely powerful rockets. According to co-founder and CTO Neel Kunjur, these devices can “lower the barrier to accessing power, aperture, or mass for any application in space.” Brothers made up the other cofounders.
However, the size of the satellites isn’t the only impressive aspect. K2 has created them to function in a stackable, scalable architecture, which allows clients to buy and manage a high-powered constellation at incredibly low prices, as shown in further detail today. K2’s goods might allow businesses to access higher energy orbits, such as medium Earth orbit, at now unaffordable prices.
The launch vehicle fairing volume was also maximized in the design of the satellites. Ten Mega-class satellites can be stacked within a Falcon 9 fairing, launching 200 kilowatts of electricity in a single flight. That 40 Megawatts might fit within a starship and generate 800 kW of electricity at once is even more astounding.
The 25-kilowatt ViaSat-3 communications satellite, one of the most powerful satellites ever placed in orbit, cost almost $500 million to develop. A 10 Mega-class constellation, on the other hand, would cost less than $150 million.
According to Neel, who spent more than five years at SpaceX building avionics for SpaceX’s Dragon spaceship, delivering high power and great packing density, was the driving force behind the satellite design.
“SpaceX is the only company maximizing the potential of the Falcon 9,” he said. “SpaceX uses every gram of the Falcon 9’s launch capability when launching a Starlink mission. Everyone else is skipping over a lot of opportunities. The maximum power density per launch was something we were aiming for. No other satellite bus manufacturer can match the amount of power we can deploy in a single Falcon 9 launch, with 200 kilowatts deployed each Falcon launch.
Aiming toward mass abundance
There are significant engineering challenges. Except for the reaction wheel, one of the most fundamental and well-established aspects of satellite design (K2’s is one of the largest ever designed), K2 is essentially redesigning a satellite from scratch. However, there are some significant advantages to not having to mass optimize every single component, such as making things more robust or out of heavier (but significantly cheaper) materials. Around 85% of the spacecraft is vertically integrated, freed from ingrained design paradigms that presume mass limitation, if only because part of the technology isn’t yet available to enable the new satellite architecture.
Attracting excellent talent has, therefore, been essential. Rafael Martinez, who was director of propulsion engineering at Apollo Fusion and led the design of the original Hall thruster for SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, was recently hired by the company to head the design of what Karan claims will be the highest-powered Hall thruster to be deployed in space by a factor of four. Ashrith Balakumar oversaw the avionics engineering team for SpaceX’s Dragon spaceship, and Drew Miller, a senior mechanical engineer with previous employment at SpaceX, Kitty Hawk, and Maxar, are two more prominent appointments.
K2’s crew has quadrupled in size since March, going from 6 to 18, and the company plans to grow even more over the next six months to about 40. This prepares the business to launch its first satellite in 2025; the launch partner has not yet been disclosed. The firm has also received an additional $7 million in financing, increasing its total capital raised to $16 million, including a $8.5 million seed round disclosed earlier this year. This shows that investor interest in K2’s purpose has not decreased.
Alpine Space Ventures, a European fund run by several early SpaceX engineers, including Catriona Chambers, who happens to have been responsible for hiring Neel at SpaceX, is one of the new investors.
Additionally, the business has won three contracts from the US Department of Military for various end customers, demonstrating intriguing momentum for K2’s bigger platform in the military sector. The three contracts, with a combined potential contract value of $4.5 million, were given to the business during the previous three months.
According to Karan, there has been a significant drive for resilience in our military architecture. Historically, resilience has taken the shape of proliferation, which called for being smaller, cheaper, and quicker. But regrettably, many use cases and end customers would want more power than those little satellites can provide. Having proliferation without compromising performance is the main factor that most end customers we’ve spoken to are thrilled about.
The Kunjur brothers highlighted a “dream mission” that would launch four or five Mega-class satellites to create a geostationary communications network around Mars as an example of the sort of future they are working toward. Because they rely on outdated Mars orbiters, not to mention any potential future flights to the Red Planet, scientific missions are severely confined in the amount of power they can transmit back.
But that’s only the start. There is still much to learn about a future in space unrestricted by mass.
“Across almost every application, what we can actually do has been severely constrained because we’ve been forced to either mass constrain our payloads, volume constrain our payloads, or even power constrain them,” Karan added. As a result, the kinds of missions you may do are more constrained.
