Beyond Reach Labs, the Brooklyn, NY startup developing a new way for spacecraft to deploy lengthy solar arrays, unveiled its first commercial-deployment system today—called Flarewing—which is expected to hit the market early next year.
The company, which raised a $10M seed round in July, has been developing a patent-pending solar-array-deployment system designed to fold flat during launch, and maintain its rigidity after deployment—thus allowing spacecraft to carry larger solar arrays.
Goldilocks choice: While much of the Flarewing technology is still under development, Beyond Reach Labs is planning three different sizes to fit a range of customer spacecraft:
- Flarewing-S has a total mass of 9kg. It stows as small as 1m long, 25cm wide, and 8cm tall, but unfolds to a maximum area of 30 m2, allowing it to gather up to 8 kW of power.
- Flarewing-M has a total mass of 29kg. Its storage size is about 3x the Flarewing-S, with only 2 cm extra height. Its maximum deployed area stands at 180 m2, for a max power of 55 kW.
- Flarewing-L is significantly larger, with a total mass of 109 kg. However, it still packs as small as 6m long, by 29cm wide, and 13cm tall. It deploys to 625 m2, and can offer spacecraft up to 200 kW of power.
Beyond Reach Labs expects to ground-qualify the Flarewing-S by the end of the year, and start integrating it onto customer spacecraft in early 2027.
Flarewing-M is expected to be ground-qualified in Q2 2027, and Beyond Reach Labs hopes to hit the same milestone with Flarewing-L before the end of next year.
Always be closing: With the new products, Beyond Reach Labs is positioning itself to cash in on the growing ambitions of space companies that are proposing increasingly power-hungry missions, such as in-space data centers and commercial space stations, which require hundreds—if not thousands—of Watts to operate.
While there’s no shortage of companies developing tech to try to solve the in-space power shortage, Beyond Reach Labs’ approach focuses on making the most of the immovable limitations of launch vehicles.
“From the outset of us coming up with this architecture, we were thinking, basically, height becomes the constraining dimension,” Beyond Reach Labs’ CTO Pele Collins told Payload. “As more people talk about constellations, then it just becomes, ‘How do you pack as many satellites into a single launch as possible?’”
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