StarSpec Technologies, which was awarded a $2.15 million contribution from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) last January, is making progress towards getting its InspireSAT demonstration satellite launched in mid-2027.
The contribution came from the CSA’s Space Technology Demonstrations for SMEs as part of Space Technology Development Program (STPD).
StarSpec has been developing and testing their “InspireSAT Constellations On-Demand Initiative”. They are developing technology that allows satellites to determine and change their orientation in space. According to the contribution description, the technology is intended to “enable rapidly-deployable, high-precision and high-accuracy 12U to SmallSat class constellations” for a variety of applications, as well as “enable rapid commercial access to LEO”.
In particular, the STDP contribution is testing StarSpec’s Attitude Determination and Control System (ADCS). Whether a satellite is facilitating communications, observing the Earth, or observing space, it needs to be positioned properly and maintain that proper position. That’s what an ADCS is for: it determines what direction a satellite is pointing in, and reorients it if it’s not facing in the direction that it should be. For many satellites this may be an occasional issue, and in some cases it can be a key challenge.
In email correspondence with SpaceQ, StarSpec co-founder and CFO John Hartley provided an update.
A start with balloon astronomy
The foundation of their focus on ADCS, he said, dates back to the formation of the company in 2020. Hartley and his co-founders, Javier Romualdez (CEO) and Steven Li (CTO), worked on “suborbital cosmology research”: cosmology being performed on stratospheric balloons. The SuperBIT platform (Super-pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope) that they helped to develop as part of the University of Toronto (UofT)Balloon Astronomy Group, for example, can do balloon-based “astronomical and Earth imaging” according to StarSpec, providing “space-like performance” for a much lower cost.
ADC is extremely challenging on a balloon. StarSpec describes it as “akin to threading a needle from more than a 3 km distance without touching the edges”. Hartley said that the experience they gained from threading that needle prompted them to form a company “to build suborbital gondolas for other researchers and institutions across North America”.
After four years, he said, they are “growing and are working with a wide number of institutions and agencies” including the CSA, IRAP, NRC, UofT, and NASA.
Orbital testing of ADCS
Hartley said that taking those skills and applying them to orbital satellites, and to developing technology appropriate for orbital operations, is “the natural stepping stone for space hardware development”. Using the STDP award, they’ve been spending the last year developing and building an ADCS for small satellites from 12U up to 250kg, as well as a satellite for testing it.
Hartley added that this will be “the first commercially available ADCS system that can provide Attitude Determination…and [Attitude Control] at the sub-arcsecond level”. (An arcsecond is one 60th of a 60th of a degree). Hartley gave an example, saying that “if a satellite has a telescope on board and it needs to observe something very faint like a distant galaxy, the InspireSAT ADCS system can aim the telescope at the intended target and stabilize the satellite to the sub-arcsecond level, allowing for highly stable, long exposures.”
Of course, stable and long exposures could also be extremely useful in focused earth observation.
Hartley said that the InspireSAT demonstration satellite itself is “a 12U satellite designed and built at StarSpec Technologies”. It is scheduled for launch in “June-July of 2027” according to Hartley. Once in orbit, StarSpec will be “commissioning the ADCS in orbit and demonstrating the ADCS performance with feedback from its onboard sensors”, which include star trackers, gyroscopes, and a small onboard telescope, among others.
(Hartley did not go into specifics about how the satellite would be performing attitude control, but one of the company’s current products is the CRW Cogless Reaction Wheel, and flywheel-based reaction wheels are a standard method of satellite attitude control.)
Hartley also said that, after launch, the whole thing would be quickly underway. “The ADCS commissioning and testing operations of the mission [will happen] in the first few months in orbit”, he said, although the InspireSAT satellite “will remain in orbit for 5 years”. This extended post-testing period will not only “allow the telescope to take images that are interesting for astronomy research”, but also “provide valuable information on our ADCS systems lifetime performance characteristics.”
“Significant interest” in ADCS and on-demand constellations
Once that’s done, Hartley said that they intend to move forward on InspireSAT and the “constellation on demand” concept. Hartley explained that the ultimate goal is “to develop a universal satellite that can support a generic payload”, one which “will allow StarSpec to rapidly produce high performance small satellites as constellations on demand.” They’re already working on the bus design for this “universal satellite”, though that isn’t part of their STDP efforts.
In StarSpec’s announcement of the funding, they said that “we also wanted this to be a first step in re-engaging with those that have expressed interest and enthusiasm” in the InspireSAT project.
Hartley explained that this referred to “significant interest in a high precision ADCS system and a constellation on demand model”. Hartley said that their ADCS already “outperforms those currently available in both precision and cost”. As bespoke constellations are “time consuming and expensive to design, test, and deploy”, he’s also seen significant interest in “a standard turn-key satellite system for small sat constellations”, one that provides a “standardized small sat suitable for a generic payload.”
He believes that this would resolve critical pain points for companies and institutions with an interest in space, and could have a big impact on the space industry.