\u201cIf you\u2019re designing a space mission and trying to get a capability to space, you\u2019re constrained by two things,\u201d co-founder and President Joe Landon said in a recent interview. \u201cOne, you have to build something that can either fit or fold into a rocket, and you also have to constrain yourself by what satellite bus you\u2019re going to go on. We saw that increasingly, missions need more scale and more size \u2026 larger antennas, higher power, and with higher power, the need for larger radiators.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead of astronauts and robotic arms, Rendezvous is betting on autonomous swarm assembly and electromagnetism. The company is commercializing a technology called \u201ctesserae,\u201d flat-packed modular tiles that can launch in dense stacks and magnetically latch to form structures on obit. With a software command, the tiles are designed to unlatch and rearrange themselves when the mission changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey find each other, they communicate\u2026 they arrange themselves, come together using magnetic docking and then latch together,\u201d Landon said. \u201cIf you want to change that arrangement or replace something or upgrade, you can just send a command \u2026 unlatch, move over here, go into storage or come out of storage and we can change the arrangement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The current tiles are around the size of a dinner plate and roughly an inch thick, though the team envisions scaling tiles to the diameter of a rocket fairing. Each tile has its own processor, a variety of sensors and a battery. These are \u201cpretty simple\u201d devices designed for mass manufacturing at low cost, Rendezvous CEO and co-founder Phil Frank said.<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The technology was invented by Ariel Ekblaw during her time at MIT, and incubated at Aurelia Institute, the nonprofit organization she founded. She teamed up with Frank, a telecom veteran, and Landon, a longtime space executive, to spin the tech out of Aurelia and take it to the commercial marketplace.<\/p>\n
The company was formalized around Thanksgiving 2024, and the team has been busy \u201cevangelizing the solution and the technology\u201d since, as Frank puts it. <\/p>\n
Landon, who started his career as an engineer in Boeing\u2019s commercial satellites business and later led R&D at Lockheed Martin Space, said the company is headquartered just outside of Denver.<\/p>\n
Rendezvous closed a $3 million pre-seed led by Aurelia Foundy and 8090 Industries, with ATX Venture Partners, Mana Ventures, and angel investors. The round willbe used to hire more employees and help move the tech from demo to a full-scale product on orbit.<\/p>\n
The company is first targeting missions \u201cwhere physical scale, physical size is going to drive performance,\u201d Landon said, like missions that demand large solar arrays or large antenna apertures. On the commercial side, the focus is on communications missions that need large antenna apertures to communicate with small antennas on the ground, like phones or cars. For national security, it\u2019s remote sensing that benefits from very sensitive detection systems.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/tesserae-ISS_b55e88.webp\")
tesserae on board the iss. image credit: rendezvous robotics<\/p>\n
Tile prototypes have already flown on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard and on two missions aboard the International Space Station. The ISS demonstrations proved out the autonomous docking, self-correction, and reconfiguration capabilities. <\/p>\n
Looking ahead, the company is aiming to conduct a demo on the ISS in early 2026, followed by a mission outside the ISS in late 2026 or early 2027. That will be followed by \u201ca real mission that shows mission utility,\u201d Landon said, building an antenna aperture in space.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not building a specific thing,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re providing a new way to build. It\u2019s the \u2018how\u2019 you build, not the \u2018what\u2019 you build.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For decades, engineers designing space structures have been constrained by the rocket fairing: only hardware that can be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3844],"tags":[142058,70,413,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-413342","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-rendezvous-robotics","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-space","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115180487256206784","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}