Venture capital investor Allied Minds has formed BridgeSat, a Boston-based start-up developing technology to improve transmission capabilities from low Earth orbit satellites to terrestrial ground stations.
Allied, which is based in Boston but listed in…
Venture capital investor Allied Minds has formed BridgeSat, a Boston-based start-up developing technology to improve transmission capabilities from low Earth orbit satellites to terrestrial ground stations.
Allied, which is based in Boston but listed in London, created BridgeSat through a commercial partnership with smallsat experts The Aerospace Corporation, a federally-funded research centre based in the space and aerospace hub of El Segundo, California.
The VC fund predicts that demand for accurate and frequent data collection from LEO satellites will accelerate aggressively over the next decade as the cost of building and launching satellites continues to fall.
There is a number of sizeable smallsat constellations being developed by companies such as OneWeb, SpaceX, LeoSat and Skybox Imaging to name but four.
Allied’s formation of BridgeSat provided “an avenue for technology transfer to the commercial sector for the common good”, according to Sherrie Zacharius, a vice president at The Aerospace Corporation.
BridgeSat, which is also partnering with MIT-affiliated Draper Laboratory, is developing an optical communication system to provide an alternative downlink mechanism that is faster, more secure, and cheaper than traditional radio-frequency transmissions.
John Serafini, vice president at Allied, said “At BridgeSat, we believe we’ve solved challenges including size, weight, cost and power bottlenecks that had traditionally hampered optical-based data downlink, as the technology ultimately offers substantial benefits over traditional RF downlink.”
BridgeSat has also hired MIT professor Kerri Cahoy as a senior adviser and optioned relevant intellectual property from the university.
In a statement Cahoy said: “We are innovating to improve and miniaturize spacecraft-pointing capabilities, an important enabler for higher-rate narrow beam optical systems, improved transmitter efficiency and the development of low-cost, easily deployed, and effective ground systems.”
BridgeSat marks Allied’s first investment in space. The firm was created in 2006 and aims to commercialise science and technologies from US universities and government research institutions.
Allied raised £76.2m (US$128m) from its IPO on the London Stock Exchange in June 2014, which valued the firm at £398m (US$667m). At the time the investor said it had partnerships with 33 US universities and 26 US federal institutions.
