Astrocast is a Swiss satellite communications company based in Lausanne. It aims to establish a global satellite network for IoT applications.
Astrocast was founded in 2014 [1] by EPFL alumni, and employed 70 people in 2021. [2] It launched its first five satellites in December 2018 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, [3] and another five in June 2021. [4] It aims to operate a full network of 100 satellites by 2024. [2] Astrocast's nanosatellites are CubeSats, cubes 10 cm (3.9 in) large. [3]
Astrocast is backed by venture capital firm Adit Ventures, Airbus SE's venture arm and the European Space Agency. [5] In June 2022, Astrocast announced that it was acquiring Hiber, an Amsterdam-based IoT space tech company. [6]
As of January 2023 the company has launched four batches of satellites, for a total of 18 spacecraft currently in orbit around the Earth.
Flight No. | Mission | COSPAR ID | Launch date | Launch vehicle | Orbit altitude | Inclination | Number deployed | Deorbited |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Astrocast 0101-0105 | 2021-006 | 24 January 2021 | Falcon 9 Block 5 | 521 km x 533 km | 97.4° | 5 | 0 |
2 | Astrocast 0201-0205 | 2021-059 | 30 June 2021 | Falcon 9 Block 5 | 510 km x 530 km | 97.6° | 5 | 0 |
3 | Astrocast 0301-0304 | 2022-158 | 26 November 2022 | PSLV-XL | 504 km x 517 km | 97.4° | 4 | 0 |
4 | Astrocast 0401-0404 | 2023-001 | 3 January 2023 | Falcon 9 Block 5 | 4 | 0 |
Iridium Communications Inc. is a publicly traded American company headquartered in McLean, Virginia, United States. Iridium operates the Iridium satellite constellation, a system of 75 satellites: 66 are active satellites and the remaining nine function as in-orbit spares. Iridium Satellites are used for worldwide voice and data communication from handheld satellite phones, satellite messenger communication devices and integrated transceivers, as well as for two-way satellite messaging service from supported Android smartphones. The nearly polar orbit and communication between satellites via inter-satellite links provide global service availability.
ORBCOMM is an American company that offers industrial internet and machine to machine (M2M) communications hardware, software and services designed to track, monitor, and control fixed and mobile assets in markets including transportation, heavy equipment, maritime, oil and gas, utilities and government. The company provides hardware devices, modems, web applications, and data services delivered over multiple satellite and cellular networks.
This article documents notable spaceflight events during the year 2018. For the first time since 1990, more than 100 orbital launches were performed globally.
Brandwatch is a social media suite company owned by Cision. Brandwatch sells two different products: Consumer Intelligence and Social Media Management.
SkySat is a constellation of sub-meter resolution Earth observation satellites owned by Planet Labs, providing imagery, high-definition video and analytics services. Planet acquired the satellites with their purchase of Terra Bella, a Mountain View, California-based company founded in 2009 by Dan Berkenstock, Julian Mann, John Fenwick, and Ching-Yu Hu, from Google in 2017.
Target Partners is a European venture capital fund claiming ca. €300 million under management. It is located in Munich and founded in 1999. The general partners are Waldemar Jantz, Kurt Müller, Berthold von Freyberg, and Michael Münnix.
Planet Labs PBC is an American public Earth imaging company based in San Francisco, California. Their goal is to image the entirety of the Earth daily to monitor changes and pinpoint trends.
Space launch market competition is the manifestation of market forces in the launch service provider business. In particular it is the trend of competitive dynamics among payload transport capabilities at diverse prices having a greater influence on launch purchasing than the traditional political considerations of country of manufacture or the national entity using, regulating or licensing the launch service.
NanoAvionics Corp is a small satellite bus manufacturer and mission integrator founded as a spin-off from Vilnius University, Lithuania in 2014.
This is a corporate history of SpaceX, an American aerospace manufacturer and spacetransport services company founded by Elon Musk.
Tomorrow.io is an American weather technology company. It provides real-time weather forecasting services and APIs.
Wasabi Technologies, Inc. is an American object storage service provider based in Boston, Massachusetts that sells one product, an object storage service called Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. The company was co-founded in September 2015 by David Friend and Jeff Flowers and launched its cloud storage product in May 2017.
Skyrora Ltd is a private space company based in the United Kingdom since 2017.
Pixxel is an Indian based private space technology company, aiming to put a constellation of 30+ hyperspectral earth observation micro-satellites into a Sun-synchronous orbit in the 2020s. The company is headquartered in El Segundo, California and Bengaluru, Karnataka. It was founded by Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal while still studying at BITS Pilani in 2019. Pixxel was also Asia's only space startup to qualify for the 2019 Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator in Los Angeles.
OroraTech is a German aerospace start-up company providing wildfire monitoring by employing nanosatellites. It was founded in 2018 as a university spin-off at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). The headquarters are in Munich, Germany.
Swarm Technologies, Inc. is a company building a low Earth orbit satellite constellation for communications with Internet of things (IoT) devices using a store and forward design. Social Capital incubated Swarm, Craft Ventures was an early investor. On 16 July 2021 Swarm entered into an agreement to become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX.
EnduroSat AD is a Bulgarian aerospace manufacturer headquartered in Sofia. It was founded in 2015 by Raycho Raychev. The company designs, builds, and operates CubeSats and Nanosatellites for commercial and scientific missions and is developing inter-satellite linking and data applications. EnduroSat was nominated as one of the top 5 small satellite start-ups.
FOSSA Systems is a company based in Madrid, Spain, specializing in satellite manufacturing and IoT solutions. Their services include space-related technologies and solutions for IoT applications. The company operates within the European market.