Dmitriy Sternharz, the CEO and founder of leading German satellite integrator Exolaunch, is stepping back from a day-to-day role with the firm as Robert Sproles, the company’s CTO, takes over as the new chief executive, the company told Payload exclusively.
Exolaunch has emerged as the key middle-manager between small satellite companies and their launchers, particularly SpaceX’s rideshare missions. The Transporter-11 mission scheduled for Friday will deploy 42 spacecraft, from 13 countries, integrated by Exolaunch. By the end of the year, the company expects to have flown its 500th spacecraft since being founded in 2011.
That’s a surprising outcome for a company that has never raised money, was founded by an academic, and managed to pivot out of a strategic partnership with Russia’s space agency after the invasion of Ukraine, going on to become a favorite partner of American satellite operators, including those that work with the US DoD.
Sternharz’s decision to hand over the reins comes at a critical moment for the company: Many of its rivals, including Spaceflight and Momentus, have faltered, and Sproles says he has a mandate to raise money and scale the business.
“We need a different type of leader—one that is focused on ensuring the business has the people, the processes, and the day-to-day execution to continue to grow and lead the NewSpace industry as a leading launch integrator,” Sternharz told Payload in an email.
Cube pioneers: Sternharz, born in Soviet Uzbekistan, enrolled as a student at the Technical University of Berlin in 2000, and became involved in its pioneering work in small-satellite development. In 2007, as a graduate student facing the challenge of how to get a small spacecraft built at the university to orbit, he had his first experience booking a rideshare.
Betting correctly that cubesats were the future, he founded Exolaunch in 2011, telling Payload that “it was obvious to me, as a developer and insider of this industry still in its early stages, that the demand for launch services for cubesat-class satellites would grow…at the same time, it was also obvious to me that practically no one was working to solve the challenges in finding launch services for this class of small spacecraft.”
At that time, Russian launchers were frequent flyers, and Exolaunch’s most important early partner was Glavkosmos, the commercially-focused subsidiary of Russia’s space agency. One Russian Glavkosmos executive, Jeanne Allarie, joined Exolaunch in 2018 to lead the launch business. But the firm went on to develop partnerships with Rocket Lab and SpaceX to integrate payloads on their launch vehicles.
Despite not raising money, the company was cash-flow positive and had decent margins, with one industry source familiar with the company suggesting it could become a $1B enterprise. Exolaunch was able to succeed in part because the cost of engineering talent in Germany is lower than in the US. But customers and rivals alike also stressed the company’s consistency and execution, and the heritage of its deployers and separation systems.
Sproles, hired as CTO in November after eight years at Spire, said his experience hiring Exolaunch to deploy satellites inspired him to join the firm. “Exolaunch repeatedly just showed a different level of customer service,” he said. “Their hardware was more reliable and gave me more confidence than really any other provider.”
Bad news from Kiev: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sent shockwaves throughout the global space industry, particularly after the US and Europe imposed sanctions on Russian space companies.
“Russia invading Ukraine freaked them out, because they’re very pro-European, and at the time they had to make a choice,” an industry source told Payload of Exolaunch’s management.
While the company had business and personal ties to Russia, its employees hailed from around the world, including Ukrainian staff whose families had to be evacuated from the conflict zone. Exolaunch pivoted to focus on mainly US launch vehicles, opening US offices in 2021. Allarie and Sternharz began using those names, rather than their original last names, Medvedeva and Bogdanov.
“It’s important that we don’t reflect on past decisions through the lens of current events. Soyuz was the first non-ISS orbital-class launch vehicle that provided capacity for smallsat launches,” Sternharz told Payload in an email. “Being a global company headquartered in Germany, Exolaunch is fully compliant with industry regulations and cross-border sanctions. But even before Russian sanctions were put in place, Exolaunch’s last Russian Soyuz mission was in September 2020.”
Expansion opportunity: The role of launch integrator is a delicate job, particularly in a world with only a few launch vehicles flying rideshare missions regularly. Timing for space launch is never simple, and juggling customers and rockets requires finesse.
“It’s not a high margin business, but the US government and most satellite manufacturers are not going to want to do the integration work, it’s a hassle,” said Curt Blake, the former CEO of integrator Spaceflight who now advises space start-ups at law firm Wilson Sonsini. “To the degree you deal with a lot of different launch providers, different structures, you can charge for that knowledge and making that happen.”
Can integrators go beyond that grunt work? A natural business is developing orbital transfer vehicles to deliver rideshare customers to target orbits, but Spaceflight and Momentus—the former broken up and acquired by Firefly, the latter on financial life-support—show the difficulty of that business model. Blake argued that integrators need to pursue higher-margin businesses, whether that’s OTVs or satellite servicing; Exolaunch’s European rival D-Orbit is pursuing that vision.
Exolaunch executives say they want to do what they’re doing now, just more of it and with larger satellites as they become more common. The company is booked through early 2027, and Sproles said he is talking to investors that are eager to help a financially-sustainable company scale.
“We’d love to be a so-called rideshare powerhouse for the world,” Allarie said. “We’d love to have the best facility at ready 24/7, to test all the payloads before they go to space, and to have all this infrastructure here in Germany for any cubesat or microsat, the full range of systems supporting all segments. And we just want to scale—we would like to have more payloads in each upcoming Transporter mission.”
Hang on tight: Maybe the most important factor for Exolaunch is out of their hands: While the company flies with Rocket Lab, ISRO, and ESA, the bulk of its work comes from its strong relationship with SpaceX and the Falcon 9. Speaking before a July anomaly that briefly grounded the vehicle, Sproles worried about what might happen if a similar situation put it out of commission for months.
“There’s tremendous risk there,” he told Payload. “So I think that as an industry, we all want to support multiple launchers, Ariane 6, Vulcans coming on board, you’ve got startups coming out your ears that are trying to do this. We wish them all luck— their success is our customer success.”
