Galaxia announced Wednesday it is building OSPREY, a satellite that will test handing data from older spacecraft to a new satellite in orbit and processing it there, with funding from a Department of National Defence (DND) IDEaS challenge award.
The Halifax company said the work is funded through Gateway to the Stars: Advancing hybrid space networks in low Earth orbit, a challenge under DND’s Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) program. Galaxia builds and operates satellites and makes computers that process their data in orbit. It will build OSPREY on its Halifax Class satellite bus for defence sensing and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) in places with poor communications, such as the Canadian Arctic.
Federal contract disclosures show DND awarded Galaxia a competitively sourced contract worth about $5.7 million on April 6. It is the only DND contract the records list for Galaxia since its tactical satellite award last year. The challenge offers up to $5 million, before taxes, for building and validating a prototype. SpaceQ did confirm that the record is the OSPREY contract.
Handing off data in orbit instead of waiting for a ground station
Galaxia says OSPREY will explore another route for moving data other than the traditional route in which a satellite holds what it collects until it passes over a ground station. Data from legacy spacecraft would instead go to a new satellite in orbit equipped with Galaxia’s technology suite, then be processed onboard or forwarded through other networks in low Earth orbit. That could give older satellites, limited by their links to the ground, a faster way to deliver what they collect, the company says.
The company expects that processing the data in orbit, with what it calls its cyber layer in space, would cut how much has to be sent to the ground and get results to users sooner. OSPREY will also support baseline monitoring and technology tests meant to inform future Canadian hybrid space architectures, which link different kinds of satellites and communications systems.
“Galaxia is developing intelligent spacecraft that can operate cooperatively, establish resilient communications, form secure space-based networks, process observations onboard and deliver relevant information to users in near real time,” founder and chief executive Arad Gharagozli said in the release.
Kepler won the only other Gateway award DND has announced
DND issued the Gateway challenge in September 2025 as one of five new IDEaS challenges, and proposals closed Oct. 22 that year. It asked for in-orbit experiments that send data from a source through a gateway satellite, across one or more relay constellations and down to remote terminals, especially in the North.
Funding depends on how mature a technology is, with up to $5 million for building and validating a prototype and smaller amounts for early-stage and design work. The challenge page puts the typical budget for a proposal that launches a new satellite at about $2.5 million.
In an Oct. 21 release that also announced NordSpace’s spaceport agreement, DND said the challenge is investing $17.9 million in projects to improve satellite connectivity. DND identified only one recipient, Kepler Communications, which gets a two-year, $4.7 million contract to develop and test laser links that let satellites exchange data directly.
Contract records list a DND contract to Kepler worth about $4.6 million, dated Sept. 24, close to the announced figure. With the Galaxia OSPREY contract, the two awards account for a little over $10 million of the challenge total, leaving about $7.5 million in awards DND has not identified.
OSPREY joins Galaxia’s tactical satellite for DND
Galaxia’s first satellite, MÖBIUS-1, reached orbit in June 2025. Since then the company has unveiled its Onyx Edge orbital computing system and closed a $4.5 million seed round, partly to meet the standards for supplying secure hardware to DND. In February, it agreed with Palo Alto’s Apolink to fly an inter-satellite link on one of its missions in 2027.
Defence Research and Development Canada awarded Galaxia a $2.5 million contract last year, before the Gateway challenge closed, to build a separate spacecraft, the Canadian Tactical Operations Satellite (CTOS). CTOS also uses the Halifax Class bus and will test routing data through orbit with onboard computing. Galaxia was targeting a launch in 2027 or 2028 when it announced the contract, and it has not announced when OSPREY will fly.