Each astronaut hour in orbit costs $130,000. What if robots could help with some of the grunt work—while also giving the world a better view of living in space?
That’s the founding thesis behind ORBES, an in-space robotic startup founded in 2024 by Anna Shaposhnik.
Origin story: The 24-year old met NASA Astronaut Terry Virts when she was a student at the University of Southern California, doing a degree in arts, technology, and the business of innovation. Virts, who shot footage for the IMAX documentary A Beautiful Planet while aboard the ISS, talked about the challenges of both filming and working in orbit.
Hence, ORBES was born. Shaposhnik, who serves as its CEO, believed she could build robots to provide practical and artistic support for space missions..
Ticket to ride: The CA-based company has two products.
- ORB—designed for missions inside space stations—is set to head to the ISS for the first time next year, in partnership with Voyager Technologies.
- EXO-ORB—which will capture exterior footage of space structures—will fly on the demo mission of Symphony Space’s Adagio platform in late 2027 or early 2028.
The big (motion) picture: The tech has immediate practical applications, such as allowing companies to inspect the exterior of sats and spacecraft. But Shaposhnik sees those missions as laying the ground for longer-term partnerships with STEAM applications, including filming movies in-orbit or collecting footage that can allow everyone to experience space stations through virtual reality.
“It’s like a go-to market strategy. Right now there’s a lot of infrastructure operators thinking about, ‘How do I get infrastructure built and working?’ The ability to capture external footage for both engineering review and communication purposes is actually the most urgent need right now,” she said. “We get our foot in the door through being able to capture external views, but we’re also going to be trusted as the operators to be able to maintain their structure.”
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“That’s where I realized we’re stuck at a 1980s standard: still shielding spacecraft with aluminum, and rad-hardened electronics [were] too expensive to build at the scale this economy demands,” Hunain told Payload.
Dallas-based Balerion Space Ventures has surpassed its $200M target for its second fund, the firm announced Thursday. Fund II—which remains open—is more than five times the size of the firm’s debut fund, which came in at just under $40M.
Balerion had closed ~$90M as of May, according to Venture Capital Journal. Cofounder and General Partner Daniel Kleinmann chalked up the momentum since then to portfolio companies hitting milestones and raising up-rounds—which he said resonated with LPs.
The firm is also holding back capital for follow-on rounds. “These are really capital-intensive businesses,” Kleinmann told Payload. “Having the ability to reserve capital to continue supporting these businesses as they hit major technical, commercial, government milestones is really important to us.”
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