Rendezvous Robotics has come out of stealth with a $3 million pre-seed round and a plan to build spacecraft that build themselves and then build other spacecraft in orbit.
The company’s modular “tesserae” tiles are meant to magnetically dock into large structures — think antennas or solar arrays — and then unlatch and reconfigure based on changing mission needs, effectively replacing the fixed architectures that have long defined space.
Founded by CEO Phil Frank and President Joe Landon, the startup is commercializing R&D out of space architect Ariel Ekblaw’s work at MIT and from its incubation at the nonprofit Aurelia Institute. Aurelia Foundry, 8090 Industries, ATX Venture Partners, Mana Ventures, and a number of angels are among other backers. The team is located just outside Denver, a booming center for aerospace talent and supply chains.
Why reconfigurable infrastructure matters
For decades, space hardware has been limited by its size and shape to the confines of the rocket fairing: If it can’t fit — or fold — then it can’t fly. Because of that limitation, truly large structures are difficult to deploy, and nearly impossible to change once in orbit. The International Space Station, constructed over scores of shuttle flights and at a cost well in excess of $100 billion, is a testament to the difficulty of building big in space.
Mission requirements are moving in the other direction, though. Communications companies have lobbied for larger apertures to underpin direct-to-device connections to phones and cars. Remote sensing operators want larger, cooler radiators and longer baselines for greater sensitivity. And defense users want systems that can be upgraded or retasked without having to launch a new satellite. The Space Report has put the global space economy at more than half a trillion dollars, and satellite/commercial/government stakeholders are increasingly seeing on-orbit adaptability as a key for safeguarding assets, increasing lifetime, improving capabilities and even creating new markets through performance enhancement.
Reconfigurable infrastructure holds out a different economics: Send up dense stacks of simple tiles, build only what you need now, then renege, add, or replace modules later.
Potentially, that could save on nonrecuring engineering, alleviate single-point failures or enable operators to update payloads as it sees fit, as spectrum rules evolve, as its own customers’ needs change, as threats change.
How the tesserae tiles work
The company’s existing tiles are about as wide as a dinner plate and an inch thick. Includes A processor, sensors, battery, and an electromagnetic docking interface are all housed in each device. Swarming software allows the tiles to locate and identify one another, negotiate their arrangement, and attach magnetically before locking into place mechanically. Connections can be released at a later date by a software command, allowing the structure to reconfigure or route a failed tile into on-orbit “storage.”
It’s not so much traditional robotics arms or astronaut assembly as it is a kind of large-scale self-assembly. The tiles are purposefully plain—not to require mass production, and to reduce cost-per-unit. Rendezvous imagines scaling the tiles up to a much larger format — potentially out to the diameter of a rocket fairing — to create large surfaces quickly, like mesh reflectors, phased arrays or heat-rejecting radiators.
On a system level, the problems are much the same as those that space engineers have faced: Getting RF performance despite having precision and stiffness requirements to keep alignment requires managing RF power and data down an architecture where the alignment of joints can change, and making sure we can work in thermal extremes, and hardening autonomy to withstand radiation.
Rendezvous says it has concentrated on minimising outside-in and inside-out autonomy docking accuracy, fault detection and correction, as well as reliable unlatch/reconfigure cycles — the elements which make up trust for operators.
From demos to orbital utility
Early prototypes have flown on Blue Origin’s New Shepard and the International Space Station, where the team proved that the thrusters could self-dock and reconfigure themselves in microgravity. The roadmap envisions a bit more on-station testing, a demonstration outside the environment of the station and then a full-fledged mission that demonstrates actual utility — say, the assembly of a real working antenna aperture in space.
The new capital will finance hires, environmental tests, and path-to-flight maturation, shifting away from lab demos towards a product that operators can purchase. Early customers are expected to include programs for which physical aperture size drives system performance directly: large power systems (solar arrays), narrow beam width communications requirements (reflectors), and more sensitive remote sensing instruments (larger collecting areas or colder operations).
A crowded, consequential frontier
There is significant interest in on-orbit servicing, assembly, and manufacturing. Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicles have already extended the lifetimes of satellites. (Orbit Fab is building out the fuel depots that will make servicing possible.) Redwire has ideas about in-space manufacturing, while startups like Starfish Space are working on autonomous rendezvous and docking. Through government programs like NASA’s and DARPA’s, the concept of modular in-space construction has been experimented with; and while some flagship efforts have been put on ice, the technical foundation and the workforce are still there.
That approach is noteworthy also for its emphasis on reconfiguration, not just assembly, says Rendezvous’ Martin. The gates are now open for piecemeal upgrades, graceful descent and even mission tailoring on the fly. But it also adds new demands: strong autonomy for operations in crew proximity, electromagnetic compatibility, stringent SCC like debris mitigation à la SCC, and careful spectrum coordination, for large, reconfigurable antennas. Regulators and insurers will demand robust fault tolerance, cybersecurity, and end-of-life plans.
What success could unlock
If the tiles perform, operators might even be able to kick off smaller stacks and assemble sprawling structures in low Earth orbit, cislunar space, or beyond. Smaller and more accurate apertures would find particular use in direct-to-device satellite networks, the kind analysts predict will serve hundreds of millions of users. Defense users could retask their assets quickly and exchange tiles to include sensing modes or boost power. Power beaming could be tested by researchers, or adjustable radiators could be used for deep-space missions. Future habitats may also be able to use reconfigurable panels to trade volume for function as time progresses.
It is an audacious gamble: Attempt to make building in space as easy as updating computer software. As the company’s founders like to put it, the true innovation isn’t the “what” you build, but the “how” — and, critically, how frequently you can change it when it’s already in orbit.