It may be happening quietly, but there is a revolution taking place with in-space transportation, and it opens up a world of possibilities.
In January, a small spacecraft built by a California-based company called Impulse Space launched along with a stack of other satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket. Upon reaching orbit, the rocket’s upper stage sent the satellites zipping off on their various missions.
And so it went with the Mira spacecraft built by Impulse, which is known as an orbital transfer vehicle. Mira dropped off several small CubeSats and then performed a number of high-thrust maneuvers to demonstrate its capabilities. This was the second flight by a Mira spacecraft, so Impulse Space was eager to continue testing the vehicle in flight.
Giving up control
This was all well and good up until this summer, when a funny thing happened. Impulse handed control of Mira over to another company, which had installed its own software package on the vehicle. And this second company, Starfish Space, took control.
This was more than a little weird, acknowledged Eric Romo, the president and chief operating officer of Impulse Space, in an interview.
“I would walk past mission control, and our teams would be on a call together, and I would just pop my head in and say, ‘Hey, don’t crash spaceship, please,’” Romo said. “It was definitely a new thing.”
But Starfish Space did not crash Mira. Rather, it activated its camera on board the spacecraft and started flying the vehicle. To what end? Founded in 2019, the Washington-based company seeks to build affordable spacecraft that can service satellites in space, providing propulsion or other aids to extend their lifetimes.
Now, flying Mira, the company sought to demonstrate that a single lightweight camera system, along with its closed-loop guidance, navigation, and control software, could autonomously rendezvous with another spacecraft. In this case, it was the very first Mira spacecraft launched by Impulse in November 2023. This vehicle no longer has propellant on board to control its orientation, but its solar panels periodically receive enough charge to allow it to communicate with Impulse’s engineers in California.
