A British space startup has revealed plans to launch its first satellite as part of SpaceX’s rideshare program, which it claims will usher in “a new era of space research” where astronomical data will be collected, packaged and sold “as a service”.
As with previous missions, SpaceX’s Transporter 15 program next year will use its Falcon 9 rockets to carry third-party payloads into space, including one from London-based Blue Skies Space, which says its first Mauve satellite will be included in an October 2025 launch.
Designed to complement data provided by existing astronomical efforts such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the satellite will focus on stellar spectroscopy (the spectrum of light emitted by a star), which can provide information about the composition, temperature, density, mass, distance, and luminosity of a star.
“Mauve is designed for a long-term observation campaign of hundreds of stars in our galaxy that will help the scientific community conduct key studies of stars,” Marcell Tessenyi, CEO and co-founder of Blue Skies Space, told TechCrunch.
Proposed scientific applications include studying stellar flares to determine their frequency, energy distribution, and physical properties. This range could also include studying the magnetic activity of exoplanets to determine how ultraviolet light affects their photochemistry.
There are other private companies that collect and monetize space data, but most of them are ground-based telescopes that observe deep space or satellites that provide observational data about the Earth. Blue Skies is trying to differentiate itself by collecting space data from space and making it easily accessible through a subscription-based membership model. The program already includes researchers from Boston University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, who signed up before launch to help shape the program design. This includes deciding where the Mauve satellite should observe in space and how long it should observe.
“No private company offers astronomical data as a service. We will be the first,” Tesseni said. “We will make new scientific satellites and data sets available to the community and to anyone who wants to participate. This new approach provides greater agility to the scientific community and complements the large-scale, high-performance, high-demand facilities typically provided by government agencies.”
The company has raised a total of $6.5 million since its founding, about two-thirds of which came from equity investments from minority investors including UK seed fund SFC Capital and Japan's Sparx Group. The rest came from grants, including funding from Europe's Horizon R&D program.
Commercializing Space
Founded in 2014, Blue Skies Space is the brainchild of a team of academics, including Tessenyi, who holds a PhD in astrophysics from University College London (UCL). It’s been a long time coming, with the startup going through what Tessenyi calls the “standard mission proposal process” with the typical space agencies. But the emergence of the so-called “new space” industry, which features private companies commercializing space, is creating new opportunities for companies of all sizes and focuses.
“We have spent many years engaging with the global scientific community, validating our models and better understanding their science and data needs,” Tessenyi said. “While there has been a lot going on within our business to enable Mauve’s launch, the ‘new space’ has dramatically transformed the space ecosystem over the past decade, and over that time we have been able to find the right manufacturing partners and team members to implement our vision.”
Instead of building its own satellite, Blue Skies outsourced the engineering work to more experienced manufacturers, including Hungary’s C3S and Dutch company Isispace, who set and translated the scientific requirements into technical specifications, which included a 13-cm telescope and an ultraviolet-visible spectrometer.
At the same time, Blue Skies is developing a second satellite, Twinkle, to be built by Airbus. It will include a larger telescope and a visible-light spectrometer, coupled with Teledyne sensors, and will focus specifically on spectroscopic measurements of the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.
Blue Skies wouldn't reveal how much membership will cost, but said it would reveal that information “soon.”
Despite its funding and efforts to launch an actual satellite into space, Blue Skies is still a small company, with just 12 employees based in the UK and Italy.
