The new satellite and rocket startup Phantom Space has been hard at work in stealth mode in Arizona for the past year. As the company gradually emerges from stealth mode, it has a vision of making access to space even simpler for companies trying to get a payload into orbit.
Clearly, space is a rapidly changing market and the “democratization” Phantom speaks about is already somewhat in play. CubeSats have been flying in space for nearly 20 years flying tiny cameras, experiments and payloads. Now they are taking to orbit in swarms, fueling the broadband Starlink constellation by SpaceX and the Earth observing satellites of Planet, to name a couple of key markets.
These tiny machines are leaps and bounds over what was possible in the early 1990s with big satellites, only a handful of space companies largely supporting government and military customers, and rockets that again, were built largely for institutional purposes. But Phantom Space hopes to make the next 20 years of spaceflight even simpler, as long as it can get its first rocket off the ground.
The launch plan is for Q1 of 2023, but that’s highly subject to change depending on factors such as testing, the supply chain, getting a rocket range and regulatory approval, and all the other things that fuel the background of every launch, said Canadian co-founder Michal Prywata in an interview.
But if it happens, here’s where Phantom wants to go: “There’s a lot that needs to happen to democratize access to space and reduce those costs, and get into a launch cadence that makes sense,” Prywata said of the company’s vision. Their hope is to get the satellites now sitting into warehouses onto rockets, because finding rocket space is one of the chief obstacles for satellites; even though we can launch them by the dozen these days, the demand has never been higher for launch services.
Young as Phantom Space is, this is Prywata’s third major company and his co-founder names carry a lot of weight in the space industry. Joining him is Jim Cantrell, best known for co-founding Vector Launch and helping Elon Musk start SpaceX, and Michael D’Angelo, who worked with Cantrell at Vector. (Vector Launch filed for bankruptcy in December 2019 but has plans for a restart after investors bought the rocket-launch assets during an auction, according to a Tucson.com report updated in January.)
As for Prywata, his first real business happened at age 19 when he was finishing his studies as a biomedical engineer at Ryerson University. He was one of the early founding members of DMZ, one of Canada’s largest incubators. There, he invented what he says is one of the world’s first brain-computer interfaces, allowing human thought to transform into moving a cursor on the screen – and eventually, moving a robotic device.
His next venture stayed “in the realm of brain stuff”, as Prywata put it, with a company called Bionik Laboratories Corp. that has been active for about a decade. “We created a series of technologies for neurological recovery, primarily post-stroke and traumatic brain injury,” he explained.
Long-time space readers will thus already see applications to space in Prywata’s work, as robotics in space is one of Canada’s specialties – and some of the Canadarm technology by MDA (and formerly, Spar) has been repurposed for medical work such as brain tumor surgeries. But Prywata felt Canada “has it pretty well covered from a robotics perspective.” So instead, he turned his attention to launch.
Canada currently has no in-country orbital launch capability (although smaller sounding flights still happen.) Maritime Launch Services has been discussing putting a spaceport in Nova Scotia for some time now, and it appears the Canadian government is listening closely as the topic has come up in a few space industry meetings with government this past year.
That said, Canada is still at a very early stage of launching and there are obstacles such as trade regulations that would need to be considered for cross-border opportunities. So Prywata turned to the more established market of the United States to get his company started – although he hopes one day to launch here, too, as he still lives in Toronto.
Prywata received seed money from his other companies that allowed him to create enough of a fortune to invest into Phantom Space. The other co-founders have chipped in as well, and revenues have started to flow in from at least one major customer contract in the defense industry. Given the company’s youth, not much more is being said about sources of money yet – but keep an eye on announcements in the coming weeks and months, Phantom Space said.
The company calls itself the “Henry Ford of the space industry” in that they are trying to break up the complex launch sequence into modules, much like the Ford Company made car construction modular more than a century ago.
This process by Phantom would entail mass manufacturing for satellites and for a two-stage rocket capable of lifting 450 kg to low-Earth orbit, and fuelled by liquid oxygen and kerosene. The satellites Phantom Space makes could also include ion propulsion to allow more flexibility in orbits without necessarily requiring a “kick stage”.
As is common in young companies, Phantom is using technology from elsewhere to help it get off the ground. Using another space company it bought – StratSpace, based in Tucson – it has a lead in satellite construction and plans to offer services to customers spanning everything from the early stage of development to the launching and integration. It’s common for young companies to depend on government contracts for launching, but in the long run Phantom hopes to pivot to two-thirds of revenue coming from commercial opportunities and one-third from government.
A lot of the money is also going to hiring. From a startup of three roughly a year ago, Phantom is now already at 24 people – and they hope to bring in about 14 more by the end of 2021. “To make this happen in 2022,” Prywata said – meaning to get the launch ready on time – the company anticipates they’ll need a staff of 60 by then. These staff members are largely working in Arizona and will eventually support a launch site among major contenders such as Vandenberg Air Force Base in California or Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, among other activities.
Other key milestones will need to happen on time to get the rocket launched in 2023, Prywata acknowledged, such as testing of the stages. But the engines are already qualified, with Ursa Major Technologies providing theith Hadley engines, and they have licensed the avionics and flight computer from NASA, so “we are well along the way to get these rockets built,” he said.
While pretty much every startup company has vertically integrated their technologies, Phantom Space is trying to leverage the industry connections from the founders to horizontally integrate with other companies instead. The goal is to use the “economies of scale” from these bigger producers, which would also bring in mature technologies into the startup firm, Prywata said.
Phantom Space is still at an early stage of maturity and aware that it will need to show viable products to the industry for growth, not least among them working satellites and rockets. But the company’s well-known space team and early stage revenue may mean that soon, Phantom can keep up in the fast-growing industry of space manufacturers and rocket makers.