WASHINGTON — Startup Orbital Operations has raised a seed round of funding to work on a high-performance orbital transfer vehicle that uses liquid hydrogen fuel and can stay in orbit for years.
The company, based in Long Beach, California, announced Aug. 7 it raised $8.8 million in a seed round led by Initialized Capital. Other participants in the round included Harpoon Ventures, DTX Ventures, Rebel Fund, TRAC VC and Immad Akhund.
The funding will allow the company to work on key technologies for its proposed Astraeus orbital transfer vehicle. The vehicle will have a 10,000-pounds-force engine using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as propellants. That will provide the vehicle with more than 10 kilometers per second of delta-V, or change in velocity, and can move between orbits in hours.
Another key attribute of Astraeus is that it is designed to stay in orbit for years. That requires the development of a cryogenic propellant management system to prevent boiloff of the vehicle’s propellants, which means keeping liquid hydrogen at temperatures of no more than 20 kelvins, or 20 degrees above absolute zero.
Ben Schleuniger, co-founder and chief executive of Orbital Operations, said he met fellow co-founder Ross Doherty while they were working at Relativity Space. The two were also moonlighting at a startup working on a nuclear thermal propulsion system that was struggling with how to manage its liquid hydrogen propellant. That project shifted to using ammonia as propellant, which resolved the cryogenic storage challenges but sharply reduced its performance.
“We’re like, you just can’t use cryogens out in orbit, right?” he said, a conclusion based on decades of industry experience. “Well, we should doublecheck that. We should just really make sure it’s not possible to store these cryogens in orbit.”
They worked with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center on technologies that could enable active cooling of cryogenic propellants. “That’s when we pivoted to Operation Operations,” he said.
The company has developed a two-stage approach to cryogenic propellant management, with one system cooling both oxygen and hydrogen to 90 kelvins, and a second to take hydrogen down to 20 kelvins. The current focus of the company is developing that technology, with plans for ground tests of both systems in the first half of next year.
The company has not disclosed specifics of that technology, but Schleuniger said it involves concepts that have been tested on the ground but not yet in space.
The seed round, he said, will take the company up to an orbital demonstration of that cryogenic propellant management system, scheduled for 2027. The company is working parallel on the engine, with hotfire tests of the integrated engine planned to begin in 2027. Later rounds will fund development of the full vehicle with a planned 2029 first flight.
Orbital Operations initially sought commercial customers for Astraeus, signing letters of intent with several companies, such as Astranis, AstroForge and K2 Space. However, the company is now focused on defense applications.
“We don’t have the capability to respond to a threat out in geosynchronous orbit within a few hours,” Schleuniger said. “We are essentially developing the third stage of a rocket that stays out in orbit. We could rapidly respond to these threats.”
The company is working with the Air Force Research Lab to support testing and is discussions with several national security space organizations about potential uses of the vehicle. That includes exploring ways it could be a part of the Golden Dome missile defense system.
Other companies are developing orbital transfer vehicles, including some that are also high performance, like Impulse Space’s Helios vehicle. Orbital Operations says it stands out in both the high performance of Astraeus and its ability to stay in space for years. The vehicle can also be refueled in orbit. That could be done simply through supplying water to it, when would then be electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen.
The company is focused on those key technologies involving cryogenic propulsion, and plans to purchase other technologies needed for Astraeus, like rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) systems, from other companies.
“There are companies that specialize in RPO and those camera systems,” Schleuniger said. “It’s a new age for space, and so we are planning on partnering and purchasing those types of capabilities out of house.”
The funding will also allow Orbital Operations to expand. Besides the two co-founders, it currently has just one other full-time employee and a couple of interns. But, he, said, “we are hiring like crazy. We’re trying to expand the team out to about 10 to 12 people.”
The company has also moved into a 5,000-square-foot facility in Long Beach, a city that has attracted several other space companies in recent years such as Relativity Space, Rocket Lab and Vast. Doherty, who is the company’s chief operating officer, said they looked at locations in the area between Long Beach and El Segundo, but decided on Long Beach to make any future expansion easier.
“Anybody that starts in El Segundo but wants to expand has to move down to Long Beach anyways,” he said, because of limited options for affordable larger facilities. Being in Long Beach, said, allows it to attract talent from El Segundo in the north to Huntington Beach in the south.