Having successfully graduated from the 12-week Moonshot program, Exodus Orbitals are aiming to make space exploration more accessible for businesses across a wide range of sectors. They are building an ambitious solution for the challenges of the space industry, offering a way for customers to run their software payloads on a shared 'satellite-as-a-service' platform.
With Exodus Orbitals, businesses will no longer have to pay the price of a full satellite mission, instead saving money and time by booking time, sharing hardware and running their applications directly on the satellite on-board computer. This groundbreaking approach dramatically lowers cost for businesses and allows almost instant access for hundreds of application cases in Earth observation, communication and surveillance domains.
Customers will have exclusive control of the satellite for the duration of the time they book it, to avoid scheduling conflicts and allow greater flexibility of use.
“By creating a satellite-hosted platform for software applications, we will create a new market segment in the space industry that can grow exponentially, just like web and mobile applications did on terrestrial computing platforms,” says Dennis Silin, CEO of Exodus Orbitals.
Exodus Orbitals’ recent Moonshot graduation follows the Toronto company’s successful flight-qualification of their 'software-defined satellite' technology through the European Space Agency’s OPS-SAT satellite mission, launched in December 2019.
Launched in 2017, Moonshot is a specialist space-focused incubator and investment fund dedicated to ventures in areas including satellites, launch facilities, and robotics. Their incubator program set out to support ambitious startups, including Exodus Orbitals, and enable them to conduct commercial research and development in order to boost their technologies.
From a total of 225 interviews, Exodus Orbitals were one of eleven businesses selected for the accelerator program, with only five successfully graduating.
Making space exploration as accessible as software development is set to create a massive opportunity for growth, allowing companies in many industries, such as finance, agriculture and transportation to benefit from business-intelligence from space.