A promising Internet satellite is rendered unusable by power problems

Enlarge / An Astranis satellite is seen in the company factory. Astranis

Astranis, a company seeking to provide internet connectivity from geostationary space, said in May that its "Arcturus" satellite had been successfully deployed after a launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

After taking control of the satellite, Astranis then began sending commands and updating flight software before raising Arcturus' orbit and placing it in a geostationary position overlooking Alaska. Once there, the satellite connected to an Internet gateway in Utah and communicated with several user terminals in Alaska.

Soon after, however, the satellite experienced what Astranis said was a sudden anomaly with a component from a vendor on the solar generator drive assembly. In an update Friday, Astranis co-founder John Gedmark explained that this assembly rotates the solar panels to ensure they are always pointed at the Sun, allowing the spacecraft to remain fully powered at all times.

“The Astranis engineering team did an amazing job working around the clock to resolve the issue,” said Gedmark. "We have now reproduced the problem on the ground in a vacuum chamber, we have focused on the exact source of the failure and know how to fix it for future spacecraft. Since this failure occurred in the internal workings of a component provided by an external supplier, we are not able to go into all the technical details."

The disappointment of the Gedmark update is palpable.

"It's a frustrating situation: the Arcturus spacecraft is in safe condition and fully under our control, the payload and our other components designed in-house by Astranis are all functioning perfectly, and the tanks are powered for years of in-orbit operation," he said. "But unless something major changes, the mission to provide internet connectivity in Alaska will be delayed."

Fixed for the future

Astranis was founded in 2015 to investigate whether largely in-house built microsatellites could provide high-speed internet access from geostationary space at low cost. The launch of Arcturus marked the first demonstration that Astranis' small satellite technology worked in space and could survive the harsh thermal and radiative environment previously dominated by much larger satellites costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Given that this was an effort to test this technology on a shoestring budget, it's perhaps unsurprising that the satellite ultimately failed due to an unforeseen problem. The real litmus test for Astranis, now, is making sure it learns from this failure and gets the company's second satellite working in space.

In its update, Gedmark said the company understands how to quickly resolve this issue on future spacecraft in production. The company is also working on a solution to provide Internet service in Alaska, via Pacific Dataport, as originally planned with Arcturus.

The back-up plan, he said, "involves a special, versatile satellite that can function as a spare satellite in orbit and link us to a full replacement satellite. We call this satellite UtilitySat. It can operate anywhere in the world, on multiple frequency bands, with the flexibility of a software-defined satellite. UtilitySat has been in the works for over a year, is in the final stages of integration, and will manifest itself in our very next launch later this year."

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