The blockbuster initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX this month threw a massive spotlight on the space sector. It also made Elon Musk a trillionaire — at least briefly. But while Musk’s firm is focused on placing satellites some 500 to 600km above the Earth, a company based in a business park in Reading is trying to unlock one of the most valuable empty spaces in the sky.
Anatolii Papulov’s business, NewOrbit, wants to make satellites fly much closer to Earth than almost anyone else has managed — around 200 to 300km up. “The idea behind NewOrbit is that we can fly satellites three times closer to the ground compared to where they are flying right now,” says Papulov, the company’s chief executive and co-founder.
That part of the atmosphere is called very low Earth orbit. “VLEO is one of the few genuinely new commercial categories remaining in space, and opening it requires a rare combination of engineering excellence and institutional discipline,” says Jean-Jacques Dordain, former director general of the European Space Agency, and an adviser to NewOrbit.
New Orbit
The logic behind VLEO is simple: if you want a better picture of something, you move closer. If you want a stronger signal, you reduce the distance it needs to travel. But space doesn’t see it that way. The whispers of Earth’s atmosphere at that altitude start to become a problem. Papulov compares it to mountaineering. At the top of Everest, the atmosphere is thin. Climb down and the air gets thicker. The same thing happens to satellites as they move closer to the planet. “Once you start to have a more dense atmosphere, it starts to decelerate you,” he says. A conventional satellite at New Orbit’s target altitude might survive only weeks before it loses orbit and burns up.
Papulov, who has a physics background and did his masters in collaboration with MIT, started thinking about the problem during his studies. He brought in co-founder Ruslan Rakhimov and the pair started building NewOrbit in 2021. They focused on the technologies needed to make VLEO usable, including propulsion, drag reduction and autonomous control.
NewOrbit hopes its satellites could last for five years, as well as producing higher-quality outputs. A camera flown three times closer to Earth could produce sharper imagery, while weather forecasting could improve because satellites would be able to collect data from a part of the atmosphere current systems avoid.
Communications satellites could also improve from being closer to the customers they’re serving. That puts NewOrbit in the same stratosphere as Musk’s Starlink, the satellite internet network within SpaceX, but Papulov brushes aside any comparisons to Musk’s firm. Unlike Starlink, New Orbit isn’t selling a consumer service. It wants to sell the satellites and infrastructure that others can use. It’s by being different to Starlink that NewOrbit believes it can find its market.
The company raised $18.5 million (£14 million) of funding in June, with investors buying into the promise of the first satellite planned for 2028. The money will help build a production facility that Papulov describes as “a gateway for the entire world” to get to VLEO from Europe.
Like Musk, Papulov’s ambition is significant. He wants “hundreds and thousands of satellites” operating in VLEO by the end of the decade. “I realised this is a very important technology for the whole of society and for humanity in general to make us better, and nobody was working on this,” says Papulov. “And I believe this is going to be the future of all the space industry.”
