A potentially disruptive satellite company launched its first spacecraft last week as part of a Transporter mission flown on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket.<\/p>\n
The demonstration mission from a California-based firm named K2 aims to \u201cburn down\u201d the risk of the technology that will fly on the company\u2019s first full-sized satellite. So far, so good, but it\u2019s early days for the demo flight.<\/p>\n
Founded a little less than three years ago, K2 seeks to disrupt the production of large satellites by focusing on vertical integration and taking advantage of large launch vehicles, such as SpaceX\u2019s Starship and Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn, which can throw a lot of payload into space.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think we\u2019re about to go from an era of mass constraints to an era of mass abundance,\u201d said Karan Kunjur, co-founder and chief executive of K2, in an interview with Ars.<\/p>\n
By contrast, over the last decade, much of the satellite industry has gone smaller. Similar to the trend in consumer electronics, in which more computing power and other capability can be packed into smaller devices, satellites have also gotten smaller and cheaper.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we looked at the market, we saw a massive amount of small satellites,\u201d Kunjur said. \u201cThe small-satellite boom figured out how to go cheaper and faster, but it hasn\u2019t figured out how to do that without sacrificing capability.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smaller satellites typically sacrifice a lot of power, going from as much as 20 kilowatts down to 1 or 2 kW, Kunjur said. They also often have a smaller aperture (such as a lens in a telescope), reducing the quality of observations. And they must make difficult trades between payload capacity and on-board propellant.<\/p>\n
There has been less innovation in larger satellites.<\/p>\n
One of the industry-leading large satellite buses\u2014a satellite bus is the main structural component of a satellite, upon which payloads are hosted\u2014is Lockheed Martin\u2019s LM2100 spacecraft. It is a proven vehicle with a payload capacity of more than 1 ton and 20 kW of peak power. It is used for the military\u2019s Global Positioning Satellites and other government applications. The LM2100 is a robust satellite capable of operating in geostationary orbit for 15 years or longer.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Although the price of this satellite bus is proprietary, various estimates place the cost at between $100 million and $150 million. One reason for the expense is that Lockheed Martin buys most of the satellite\u2019s elements, such as its reaction wheels, from suppliers.<\/p>\n
\u201cLockheed is amazing at doing those missions with really complex requirements,\u201d Kunjur said. \u201cBut they just have not changed the way they build these larger, more complex spacecraft in the last 15 or 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n
K2 aims to disrupt this ecosystem. For example, the reaction wheels that Honeywell Aerospace sells to Lockheed cost approximately $500,000 to $1 million apiece. K2 is now on its fourth iteration of an internally built reaction wheel and has driven the cost down to $35,000. Kunjur said about 80 percent of K2\u2019s satellite production is vertically integrated.<\/p>\n
The company is now building its first \u201cMega Class\u201d satellite bus, intended to have similar capabilities to Lockheed\u2019s LM2100: 20 kW of power, 1,000 kg of payload capacity, and propulsion to move between orbits. But it\u2019s also stackable: Ten will fit within a Falcon 9 payload fairing and about 50 within Starship\u2019s fairing. The biggest difference is cost. K2 aims to sell its satellite bus for $15 million.<\/p>\n
The US government is definitely interested in this capability. About a month ago, K2 announced that it had signed a contract with the US Space Force to launch its first Mega Class satellite in early 2026. The $60 million contract for the \u201cGravitas\u201d mission will demonstrate the ability of K2\u2019s satellite bus to host several experiments and successfully maneuver from low-Earth orbit to middle-Earth orbit (several thousand km above the surface of Earth).<\/p>\n
Although the Mega Class satellite is attractive to government and commercial customers\u2014its lower cost could allow for larger constellations in middle- and geostationary orbits\u2014Kunjur said he and his brother, Neel Kunjur, founded K2 to enable more frequent science missions to other planets in the Solar System.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe looked at the decadal studies and saw all the mission concept studies that were done,\u201d Kunjur said. \u201cThere were maybe 50 studies over a 10-year period. And we realized that if NASA funding remains level, we\u2019ll be able to do one or maybe two of these. So we decided to go after one of the big problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, if we\u2019re moving into an era of launch abundance, K2 might just solve the problem of affordable science satellites to launch on all these rockets\u2014if it all works, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A potentially disruptive satellite company launched its first spacecraft last week as part of a Transporter mission flown on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket. The demonstration mission from a California-based firm named K2 aims to \u201cburn down\u201d the risk of the technology that will fly on the company\u2019s first full-sized satellite. So far, so good, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44505,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8368,20,21],"class_list":["post-44504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-k2","tag-satellite","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44504"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}