Nascent small satellite launcher Swiss Space Systems (S3) has signed up its first commercial customer with missions for medical research start-up SpacePharma.
S3 plans to use the aircraft-based suborbital system it is developing to launch four small…
Nascent small satellite launcher Swiss Space Systems (S3) has signed up its first commercial customer with missions for medical research start-up SpacePharma.
S3 plans to use the aircraft-based suborbital system it is developing to launch four small satellites in 2018 for its fellow Swiss company, and then one every month for the next two years to reach 28 missions in total.
SpacePharma will use the satellites as a platform for enabling its own customers to conduct experiments in exomedicine, a growing scientific discipline for researching medical solutions in zero-gravity.
The satellites will initially be based on cubesats weighing 5kg, although the group plans to later roll out 50kg spacecraft.
Set up last year and owned mainly by its founders, with some private investors holding minority stakes, SpacePharma managing director Martin Aebi9; said the group has already secured the funds it needs to develop its current projects. Though he added that, “similarly to other start-ups, SpacePharma is continually looking to expand company activities and therefore looking for the right partners in all aspects – funding wise as well”.
The company opened an R&D centre in Israel in mid-2013, and plans to manufacture parts of the satellites and their laboratory payloads in-house. It promises a one-stop-shop for customers, and so will also take care of ground systems for the space projects.
Aebi said the group has secured customers from the life sciences industry as well as from academic circles which, with one drug typically taking 15 years to develop, see exomedicine as a way to accelerate medical research.
He said: “Organisations and people tend to think that reaching space and studying, exploring and developing medical solutions in microgravity is horribly expensive, bureaucratic and complicated, however, the costs of launch continually decrease and SpacePharma’s solution and products will surely make the whole exomedicine process reasonably priced, easily assessable and manageable, and will create great ROI’s for both customers and investors.”
Financial details of its launch deal were not disclosed, although S3 has previously claimed its system – which involves flying a satellite-carrying suborbital shuttle on the back of an Airbus A300 for part of its journey – could launch small satellites at a quarter of current market rates. By using existing technologies, steering clear of costly ground infrastructure, and by being partly reusable, it has said it could launch satellites weighing less than 250kg for around CHF10m (US$11m).
Fully owned by founder and CEO Pascal Jaussi, S3 said most of the CHF250m (US$275.3m) budget it believes it needs to realise commercial services has already been covered.
As well as satellites for SpacePharma, S3 has also recently been selected to launch an academic spacecraft in 2018 called CleanSpace One, which will use flexible tentacles to grab space junk and throw it back into Earth’s atmosphere to burn up.
The project is being run by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and S3 said it provides an opportunity to demonstrate its technology.
S3 has been seeking to expand is launch capability across the world from Malaysia to Canada. On 8 October the company said it had signed an MoU with Spaceport Colorado to serve the North American market.
The group plans to carry out its first test launches by the end of 2017.
