By David N. Young
A visionary high technology company based in Los Alamitos may soon put the excitement of space utilization within the economic reach of everyday citizens.
While space was once limited to the confines of NASA, government officials and a few billionaires, NovaWorks™ , founded by Talbot Jaeger is working to make satellite space available to everyday citizens with big ideas.
“We offer a new way of thinking about space…if you have an idea, we can build it,” said Jaeger, who is also the company’s Chief Technology Officer, says with excitement.
Jaeger explains his concept sort of like “Lego blocks” meeting the frontier of space.
NovaWurks’™ Hyper-Integrated Satlet (HISat™) modules are biologically inspired, cellular building blocks, capable of aggregating and conforming to payloads of any size or shape.
“The entire NovaWurks team is proud to be creating and supporting such a groundbreaking technology,” said Jaeger in a press release.
The company’s technology offers the potential of revolutionizing the space industry by providing flexible, customized spacecraft solutions based on the mass-produced HISat™ platform, which drastically decreases the time and costs associated with traditional monolithic spacecraft solutions.
NovaWurks™ is celebrating the launch in December of its eXperiment for Cellular Integration Technology (eXCITe) satellite, apparently bringing more momentum to the HiSat™ concept.
According to the company, the SmallSat Express, was launched from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Air Force Base aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This is the company’s third successful launch, prompting growing excitement at the company. They have worked with NASA, commercial entities and DARPA on deployed Sat-lets.
The latest experimental satellite has been successfully deployed and the SmallSat Express is now operating above the planet in a polar low Earth orbit, according to the company.
As of now, the craft is operating flawless, according to the release.
“Immediately after deployment, eXCITe began demonstrating the robust capabilities of a HISat™ based spacecraft; accepting commands, providing telemetry, aggregating its sensors and actuators, performing body steering, demonstrating the thermal control, and more,” he added.
The eXCITe spacecraft was just one of 64 payloads aboard the Falcon 9 rocket, the largest single rideshare mission from a U.S.-based launch vehicle, and the first instance of a SpaceX booster being refit and deployed a third time.
Designed and built as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Phoenix project, this most recent phase of the project provides advanced testing and an opportunity to demonstrate the validity of NovaWurks’ Hyper-Integrated Satlet (HISat™) concept in low Earth orbit (LEO). Further, it validates the concept of an aggregated satlet system cluster.
Longer term, the NovaWurks’ HISats platform potentially provides a foundation for building safe, rapid and cost-effective solutions for space utilization.
Each HISat module contains all of the functional capabilities of an autonomous satellite, and the flexibility to conform to the shape or capability.
To Jaeger, who previously worked for Northrop Grumman, these clustered, “small satellites in a box” offers incredible promise for the future.
The boxed modules can individually be programmed remotely, or they can be changed or substituted for new modules, bringing both the “ride-share” and the “sharing economy” to the utilization of space.
“This will be quite an adventure for the next generation,” said Jaeger, acknowledging the economical platform of tiny sat-lets within a mainframe satellite is truly a groundbreaking technology with the promise of revolutionizing space utilization.
This disruptive technology opens up the commercial space market to all industries, entrepreneurs, and academic institutions, as well as to multiple commercial entities seeking access to space previously precluded by the traditional barriers to entry associated with the space industry.
In the video, Jaeger provides an example of NovaWurks™ working with a group that has programmed one of its modules to provide technology to facilitate an eye in the sky over Africa.
This single Sat-let provides ground-based volunteers in the savannahs of Africa the chance to literally monitor elephant poaching in real-time and report violators, he said.
The Los Al based NovaWurks team of designers, scientists and engineers offers a diverse background in spaceflight, consulting and research work with decades of experience in managing complex, visionary projects for government, military and corporate clients.
Chief Operating Officer Jim Greer said the company was founded in 2012 and has been located on Katella Ave. in Los Alamitos since then.
“This is a great community and we enjoy being a part of it,” said Jaeger.
For more information, visit www.novawurks.com.