Space startup Basalt Technologies started in a hangar behind a Los Angeles dentist’s office, but things quickly went south: It will soon try to hack an abandoned satellite and install its space-specific operating system .
The startup’s co-founder, Alex Choi, found himself living in said hangar after being suddenly kicked out of his dorm at MIT due to the coronavirus pandemic. He was building the university’s first custom satellite bus and continued this work in Los Angeles. Because almost everyone else on the project had quit, Choi was hiring. He ended up calling on physicist and engineer Maximillian Bhatti, who had, for the same reason, lost his job in optical physics at the California Institute of Technology.
“I ask my parents to take me to this dilapidated shed,” Bhatti said in a recent interview. “This nerd opens the door. And then inside this hangar are tens of thousands of dollars of space equipment, because we’re building a satellite here. So this is sort of the kickoff for the next six months of our lives.
The two eventually went their separate ways – Choi to the University of Toronto, Bhatti to The Aerospace Corporation and then SpaceX – before reuniting in October 2023 to found Basalt.
“We looked around the industry and we realized: the kind of problems we saw at MIT, where the hardware is really good, and it’s death by a thousand paper cuts on the software side. ..it’s not just MIT,” Bhatti said.
These thousands of paper cuts are an allusion to the difficulties of existing hardware and software in space missions. The status quo, dating back to the Apollo era, Bhatti said, is to design custom software to maximize the full hardware utility of the spacecraft’s individual components. This way of operating makes sense for one-off, ultra-ambitious missions like Mars rovers, but the space industry is quickly moving toward entire constellations of spacecraft, launched and iterated more quickly than ever. It no longer makes sense to write custom software based on each mission.
Two other things have changed: first, field computing is much cheaper than it was ten or twenty years ago. Second, space hardware and components have become a commodity. Yet the 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 integrate space missions with hardware, and then all the software, operations and other elements are customized from that hardware. This is a consequence of that. So what Basalt is doing is trying to change that paradigm,” Bhatti said.
To do this, it is building an operating system for satellite operators called Dispatch: a simulation-based control system that allows software to be portable across different hardware, in the same way that one can run Windows on a laptop built by ASUS or Dell. Bhatti also compared it to Anduril’s Lattice, which allows software-defined control of different vehicles.
Dispatch will be capable of performing autonomous spacecraft tasks, allowing operators to coordinate satellites from different fleets and quickly enable re-task of existing assets in orbit for national security missions. Using Dispatch, for example, a national security customer could repurpose any nearby satellite running the operating system to perform non-terrestrial imaging in the event of a space security crisis, or to perform terrestrial imaging in the case of a situation on the ground.
This could enable a degree of operational flexibility never before seen in mission operations. Basalt could allow users to reuse assets in orbit or allow unrelated spacecraft to work together in orbit.
It is indeed a paradigm shift, Choi echoed: “We are now at this really interesting inflection point where this industry defined by hardware, which was space, is transforming into an industry defined by the software,” he said. “So instead of constructing constellations, what if you could assign constellations? (What if) you could combine existing assets with new assets, bring them together and use them dynamically? »
To scale its product and reach air legacy 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 companies anonymous venture capitalists. Basalt will attempt to hack, recover and fly past a defunct satellite in orbit this summer to prove its technology.
From there, the company is also looking to build its three-person team and generate its first revenues. Basalt is currently in talks with ten missions, which include spacecraft in development as well as hardware already in orbit.
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