New satellites are coming to an orbit (very) near you.
Spanish startup Kreios Space announced an €8M seed round this week to help the company fly a demonstration mission of its air breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) tech in VLEO in early 2027.
The round was led by the NATO Innovation Fund and JOIN Capital, with additional participation from Grow Venture Partners, Xesgalicia, and Tasivia Global. It brings the company’s total funding to over €10M.
Hola Kreios: Founded in 2021 by six Spanish aerospace engineers, Kreios has been working on developing and testing its ABEP system, which allows sats to fly in lower and lower orbits.
ABEP works by sucking up air in the upper atmosphere that would otherwise cause drag, and using electric power to turn that air intake into thrust. Where other propulsions systems would require too much fuel to combat the drag, ABEP enables long-duration missions in VLEO and gives Kreios the ability to get lower than some competitors.
“We’ve seen plenty of companies using the term VLEO without really being in VLEO, going to the highest areas of it at like 350 km or 400 km and saying that’s VLEO. Real VLEO is 200 kilometers,” Kreios’ CEO Adrían Senar told Payload.
How low can you go? Operating a satellite that low to the ground opens the door for a range of commercial and defense missions that benefit from the proximity to Earth.
While Kreios declined to share the intended use case of their VLEO sats, Senar did mention a handful of ideas that would benefit from the lower trajectory.
- Telecommunications satellites flying in VLEO can send and receive signals much faster than those in higher orbits, and can transmit direct-to-device with greater accuracy.
- EO satellites in VLEO can image the ground in much greater detail, and transmit those images in real-time to operators on the ground.
Ultimately, Kreios expects to fly its satellites for dual-use missions, leaning on the NATO Innovation Fund to secure government contracts across Europe, and approaching the commercial sector to tout the economic benefits of VLEO for civil and commercial use cases.
“[With ABEP] you keep the same cost as we would have in LEO, but get an improvement in performance between three to sixteen times depending on the payload,” Senar said. “Basically we aim to be the leaders in very low earth orbit…We have the resources, the partners, and the technology, so that’s our vision.”
