SAN FRANCISCO – The Space Development Agency awarded SpaceRake, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup, $1.8 million to develop miniature laser communications terminals.
It was the primary government contract for SpaceRake, a firm founded in 2021 by Kerri Cahoy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Space Telecommunications, Astronomy and Radiation Laboratory director with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, and Jeremy Wertheimer, former Google vice chairman engineering with a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence.
Under the two-year direct-to-Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research award announced Nov. 1, SpaceRake will develop terminals to enable satellites as small as cubesats to transfer data through laser links with the Transport Layer, a worldwide communications network in low Earth orbit being established by SDA, a U.S. Space Force organization.
In recent months, SDA has awarded contracts to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and York Space Systems to construct Transport Layer Tranche 2 satellites equipped with optical and radio-frequency communications terminals.
While SpaceRake terminals should not being developed for “SDA-specific satellites, this miniaturized laser communications technology goes to permit small spacecraft to share data with the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture,” Weston Marlow, SpaceRake president and CEO, told .
Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture is the name SDA adopted in early 2023 for its low-Earth orbit constellation that features Transport Layer communications satellites and Tracking Layer missile-defense satellites.
Beyond optical terminals, SpaceRake plans to develop “lasercom networking technologies for a big selection of space-based and terrestrial applications,” based on the SpaceRake news release.
SpaceRake goals to “drive down costs and increase adoption of network access in space, enabling latest use cases and more data to achieve terrestrial end users,” Marlow said in a press release. “We’re changing how the industry communicates in space.”