What the business is
UK spinout building SpaceLab, a small autonomous satellite lab that hosts multiple microgravity experiments at once
The bet
Small autonomous laboratories can run microgravity experiments without astronauts, and companies will buy them
Starting capital
$270,000 in grants so far, including two UK Space Agency International Bilateral Fund grants awarded with partners
How it started
Frontier Space Technologies is a spinout from Cranfield University in the UK. SpaceLab emerged from student projects, including the PhD of co-founder and CEO Aqeel Shamsul. In 2021 the four-person founder team flew a prototype on an atmospheric balloon under the REXUS/BEXUS programme, which showed the proof of concept worked and led them to incorporate.
What happened
SpaceLab is a 3U CubeSat, two parts payload and one part bus. Its core is a Multi-Chamber Sample Disc that holds several isolated samples and rotates them past sensors, including fluorescence microscopes, visible light spectrometry and environmental sensors. Two UK Space Agency grants, awarded in partnership with The Exploration Company and Sierra Space, help develop the first payloads.
How it ended up
As of September 2023 the company had $270,000 in grants and a contract with a first commercial customer, was actively fundraising and aimed for its first on-orbit demonstrations in Q4 2024, including one for protein crystallization and one for live cell cultures.
What has to be true
Astronaut time costs $130,000 per hour and is capped at 25 hours a year for companies
A 2021 balloon flight proved the lab concept worked, which turned a student project into a company
Isolated chambers let one satellite run multiple experiments at once
UK Space Agency grants funded early payload development
What can be applied
When a scarce resource such as astronaut time sets the price, a startup can sell automation of it, but it still has to prove its hardware works in orbit.
Aftermath
As of 2023-09-21, Frontier Space Technologies had raised $270,000 in grants, had one commercial customer contracted, was fundraising and planned its first on-orbit demonstrations for Q4 2024.
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