Rendezvous Robotics exits stealth with $3M to construct reconfigurable area infrastructure

For many years, engineers designing area buildings have been constrained by the rocket fairing: solely {hardware} that may be folded as much as match inside can go to orbit.

This makes in-space meeting time intensive and costly. The Worldwide Area Station, the most important single object humanity has in-built area, was assembled over dozens of launches and value over $100 billion. And, in fact, there isn’t any solution to modify or alter the construction as soon as it has been assembled.

Rendezvous Robotics needs to vary that.

“Should you’re designing an area mission and attempting to get a functionality to area, you’re constrained by two issues,” co-founder and President Joe Landon stated in a current interview. “One, it’s important to construct one thing that may both match or fold right into a rocket, and also you additionally need to constrain your self by what satellite tv for pc bus you’re going to go on. We noticed that more and more, missions want extra scale and extra measurement … bigger antennas, increased energy, and with increased energy, the necessity for bigger radiators.”

As a substitute of astronauts and robotic arms, Rendezvous is betting on autonomous swarm meeting and electromagnetism. The corporate is commercializing a expertise known as “tesserae,” flat-packed modular tiles that may launch in dense stacks and magnetically latch to type buildings on obit. With a software program command, the tiles are designed to unlatch and rearrange themselves when the mission modifications.

“They discover one another, they convey… they organize themselves, come collectively utilizing magnetic docking after which latch collectively,” Landon stated. “If you wish to change that association or substitute one thing or improve, you possibly can simply ship a command … unlatch, transfer over right here, go into storage or come out of storage and we will change the association.”

The present tiles are across the measurement of a dinner plate and roughly an inch thick, although the crew envisions scaling tiles to the diameter of a rocket fairing. Every tile has its personal processor, quite a lot of sensors and a battery. These are “fairly easy” units designed for mass manufacturing at low price, Rendezvous CEO and co-founder Phil Frank stated.

The expertise was invented by Ariel Ekblaw throughout her time at MIT, and incubated at Aurelia Institute, the nonprofit group she based. She teamed up with Frank, a telecom veteran, and Landon, a longtime area government, to spin the tech out of Aurelia and take it to the business market.

The corporate was formalized round Thanksgiving 2024, and the crew has been busy “evangelizing the answer and the expertise” since, as Frank places it.

Landon, who began his profession as an engineer in Boeing’s business satellites enterprise and later led R&D at Lockheed Martin Area, stated the corporate is headquartered simply outdoors of Denver.

Rendezvous closed a $3 million pre-seed led by Aurelia Foundy and 8090 Industries, with ATX Enterprise Companions, Mana Ventures, and angel buyers. The spherical willbe used to rent extra staff and assist transfer the tech from demo to a full-scale product on orbit.

The corporate is first focusing on missions “the place bodily scale, bodily measurement goes to drive efficiency,” Landon stated, like missions that demand giant photo voltaic arrays or giant antenna apertures. On the business aspect, the main target is on communications missions that want giant antenna apertures to speak with small antennas on the bottom, like telephones or vehicles. For nationwide safety, it’s distant sensing that advantages from very delicate detection programs.

Tile prototypes have already flown on Blue Origin’s New Shepard and on two missions aboard the Worldwide Area Station. The ISS demonstrations proved out the autonomous docking, self-correction, and reconfiguration capabilities.

Trying forward, the corporate is aiming to conduct a demo on the ISS in early 2026, adopted by a mission outdoors the ISS in late 2026 or early 2027. That will probably be adopted by “an actual mission that exhibits mission utility,” Landon stated, constructing an antenna aperture in area.

“We’re not constructing a selected factor,” he stated. “We’re offering a brand new solution to construct. It’s the ‘how’ you construct, not the ‘what’ you construct.”