TAMPA, Fla. — LeoStella announced details about its largest spacecraft yet Aug. 6 with plans to deliver its first two 500-kilogram-class satellites to a industrial radar constellation customer next summer.
The corporate’s LS300 satellite bus can reach the length of a small yacht at 10 meters across and has greater than double the mass of its LS200 predecessor, which part-owner BlackSky is using for its upcoming third-generation geospatial intelligence satellites.
LS300 can be designed with solar array improvements for delivering one kilowatt of power, 25 times greater than LS200 to perform more demanding missions.
This power boost and LS300’s 250 kilograms of accessible payload space make it higher suited for patrons chasing Space Development Agency (SDA) contracts, LeoStella CEO Tim Kienberger said in an interview.
He said LS300 can accommodate optical inter-satellite links and the radio frequency downlink and uplink capabilities that SDA, a U.S. Space Force organization, has identified as key capabilities because it plots a big military network in low Earth orbit.
Aside from BlackSky, which jointly owns the five-year-old manufacturer with Thales Alenia Space, the one other customer LeoStella has announced for any of its buses to this point is condosat operator Loft Orbital, which selected LeoStella’s 60-kilogram LS100 bus.
Of the 19 LeoStella satellite buses currently in LEO, 16 were built for BlackSky and three were for Loft Orbital.
While Kienberger declined to reveal LS300’s first customer, he said interest is high for the larger offering, and “almost every opportunity we discuss appears to be LS300 platform based.”
He said LS300 could also pave the solution to constructing its first satellites dedicated to the communications market.
LS300’s increase in power, enabled by solar panels that may spend more time facing the sun by protruding from the satellite as an alternative of covering its surface, would give the spacecraft more on-orbit processing and data storage capabilities.
LeoStella just isn’t the one small satellite specialist moving toward larger spacecraft that may make the most of declining launch costs, and the increasing availability of rocket rideshares, to fulfill demand for increasingly capable satellites.
Other smallsat specialists, including Terran Orbital and NanoAvionics, have also been step by step increasing the scale of their platforms after initially specializing in the smaller end of the smallsat market.
The most important satellite Terran Orbital currently has under construction is 800 kilograms, CEO Marc Bell said, after step by step expanding its offering since starting out a decade ago with cubesats lower than 1.33 kilograms.
NanoAvionics recently began producing satellites with a complete mass of around 220 kilograms, nearly double its MP42 platform that gained flight heritage April 2022 to mark the corporate’s expansion out of the 10-kilogram-and-under nanosatellite class.