Space startup Basalt Technologies began in a shed behind a dentist’s office in Los Angeles, but things have quickly escalated: it will soon attempt to “hack” an abandoned satellite and install its own space-specific OS. (With the owner’s permission, of course).
The startup’s co-founder, Alex Choi, found himself living in said shelter after he was suddenly evicted from his dorm at MIT due to the coronavirus pandemic. He had been in the process of building the university’s first satellite bus and was continuing that work in LA. Because almost everyone else on the project had quit, Choi was hiring. He ended up bringing in the physicist and engineer Maximillian Bhatti, who, for the same reason, had lost his optical physics job at the California Institute of Technology.
“I make my parents take me to this dilapidated shack,” Bhatti recounted in a recent interview. “This fool opens the door. And then inside this shed is tens of thousands of dollars of space-grade equipment, because we’re building a satellite here. So that kind of started the next six months of our lives.”
The two eventually went their separate ways — Choi at the University of Toronto, Bhatti at the Aerospace Corporation and then SpaceX — before coming back together in October 2023 to found Basalt.
“We looked around the industry and realized: the kind of issues that we saw at MIT, where the hardware is really good, and it’s death by a thousand paper cuts on the software side… that’s not just MIT,” Bhatti said.
Those thousands of paper cuts are a hint at the hardware and software difficulties inherent in space missions. The status quo, which goes back to the Apollo era, Bhatti said, is to create custom software to maximize the full utility of individual component hardware on the spacecraft. This mode of operation makes sense for one-off, ultra-ambitious missions like the Mars rovers, but the space industry is rapidly shifting toward entire constellations of spacecraft, launched and repeated faster than ever before. It no longer makes sense to write custom software on a permissive basis.
Two other things have changed: first, field computing is an order of magnitude cheaper than it was a decade or two ago. Second, space equipment and components have become commodities. However, software has remained highly customized and manual — which is why Choi and Bhatti are betting it will be the next big unlock in the space.
“Right now, we build space missions in hardware, and then all the software and operations and things are customized by that hardware. It is its consequence. So what Basalt is doing is trying to change that paradigm,” Bhatti said.
It does this by building an operating system for satellite operators called Dispatch: a simulation-based control system that enables software to be portable across devices, in the same way that Windows can be run on a laptop built by ASUS or Dell. Bhatti also compared it to Anduril’s Lattice, which is enabling software-defined control of various vehicles.
Dispatch will be able to deploy autonomous spacecraft missions, enabling operators to coordinate satellites from different fleets and enable rapid recovery of existing assets in orbit for national security missions. Using Dispatch, for example, a national security customer can reassign any satellite close to the operating system to perform non-Earth imaging in the event of a space security crisis, or to perform Earth imaging in the event of a situation on the ground.
It can enable a degree of operational flexibility not previously seen in mission operations. Basalt could enable users to reuse in-orbit assets or allow unrelated spacecraft to work together in orbit.
It’s really a paradigm shift, Choi echoed: “We’re at this really interesting inflection point now where this hardware-defined industry, which has been the space, is turning into a software-defined industry,” he said. “So instead of building constellations, what if you could assign constellations? [What if] can you take legacy assets alongside new assets and combine and use them dynamically?”
To grow their product and achieve legacy flight this summer, the startup closed a $3.5 million seed round led by Initialized Capital, with contributions from Y Combinator, Liquid2, General Catalyst and other unnamed VCs. Basalt will attempt to hack, recover and fly around a defunct satellite in orbit this summer to test the technology.
From there, the company is also looking to build its three-person team and receive its first revenue. Basalt is currently in talks with ten missions, which include spacecraft in development as well as equipment already in orbit.
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