came out of stealth<\/a> last year, announced a new $10 million seed round Tuesday morning led by Konvoy, with participation from Decisive Point, Cubit Capital, Wave Function, Space Capital, Dynamo Ventures, and Channel 39. The company declined to disclose its valuation.<\/p>\nThe capital will support the design and construction of Lux Aeterna\u2019s Delphi spacecraft, which has a confirmed spot on a SpaceX rocket expected to launch in the first quarter of 2027. That mission will prove out Lux\u2019s technology by offering customers a chance to test hosted payloads and materials that will then be returned to Earth at Australia\u2019s Koonibba Test Range through a partnership with the aerospace company Southern Launch.<\/p>\n
Bringing anything back from space requires diving back into Earth\u2019s atmosphere at incredibly high speeds, which generates extreme heat. Spacecraft that want to survive the journey must be covered in materials that protect them from that heat, adding extra weight. Because that weight makes getting to space on a rocket more expensive, most spacecraft aren\u2019t designed for a return journey.<\/p>\n
That calculus typically limits reentry to vehicles that carry humans, like the Space Shuttle (which saw one vehicle lost due to the extreme environment of reentry) or SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX\u2019s repeated attempts to land its massive Starship rocket have made that challenge vivid for anyone who\u2019s watched them on YouTube.<\/p>\n
Startups like Varda Space and Inversion are tackling the same problem on a smaller scale: They are building reentry capsules that allow customers to perform experiments in space and return samples for analysis, or hypothetically deliver cargo to locations on Earth at high speed. Varda has flown five missions, returning capsules on four; Inversion hopes to launch its Arc vehicle sometime this year.<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
A reliable technology for returning payloads to Earth from space is a necessity for several futuristic business models \u2014 testing new materials in orbit, manufacturing pharmaceuticals or high-end electronics in microgravity, or harvesting resources like metals from asteroids. The U.S. military has shown interest in the ability to provide logistics support with orbital deliveries or test components for hypersonic weapons.<\/p>\n
Lux, however, has a bigger idea: making communications and Earth observation satellites reusable. Right now, satellites only have a useful life of five to 10 years due to some combination of component failures, running out of propellant, or becoming obsolete. After that, they are destroyed in the atmosphere (no heat shields, remember?) or sent to a graveyard orbit out of the way of normal space activity.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur ambitions are so much larger than just reentry,\u201d Taylor told TechCrunch, describing the potential for a \u201cdynamic upgrade capability.\u201d Said Taylor, \u201c[I]f you have a payload component, whether it\u2019s compute or a hyperspectral camera, and you want to update that technology every year, instead of having to build new satellites and keep those old ones up in space, you can bring them down and go back.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an exciting vision, but the economic reality will have to add up. The value those new payloads can create will have to be more than the added cost of building, launching, returning, and refurbishing a reusable satellite.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a regulatory challenge. Lux is headed to Australia because obtaining a reentry license to land in the U.S. right now isn\u2019t easy. Varda, which returned the first commercial spacecraft to land on U.S. soil in 2024, saw its plans delayed for several months<\/a> as it worked to convince the FAA that its returning capsule wouldn\u2019t threaten people or property on the ground below. Its subsequent missions have returned to Australia.<\/p>\nTaylor says that the pace of regulatory approvals won\u2019t be a bottleneck for the next three or four years, but expects the FAA to learn alongside the nascent reentry industry and allow for an increased return cadence.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe folks that are backing us really believe that now is the time to put that major, major paradigm shift in orbital operations,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cNot only reentry and bringing things back, [but] about bringing reusability to much larger sections of the satellite industry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The reusable rocket has transformed the space industry in the last decade, and a new startup led by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379257,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270],"tags":[1463,174312,18,19,17,125836,6144,133,451,2731],"class_list":{"0":"post-379256","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-amazon","9":"tag-brian-taylor","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-lux-aeterna","14":"tag-satellites","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-space","17":"tag-spacex"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116210014955683534","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}