Space Startups Basalt Technologies It started in a shed behind a Los Angeles dentist’s office, but things quickly progressed: Soon it would try to hack into a derelict satellite and install its own space-specific operating system on it.
Startup co-founder Alex Choi had to live in the aforementioned shed after he was abruptly kicked out of his MIT dorm due to the coronavirus pandemic. He was busy building the university’s first custom satellite bus, and was continuing that work in LA. Since nearly everyone involved with the project had quit, Choi hired people. He hired physicist and engineer Maximilian Bhatti, who had lost his optical physics job at the California Institute of Technology for the same reason.
“I ask my parents to take me to this dilapidated shed,” Bhatti explained in a recent interview. “This idiot opens the door. And then inside this shed are thousands of dollars worth of space grade equipment, because we’re building a satellite here. So that’s how the next six months of our lives began.”
The two eventually parted ways — Choi moved to the University of Toronto, Bhatti to Aerospace Corporation and then SpaceX — before reuniting in October 2023 to found Basalt.
“We looked at the industry and found that the kind of problems we had at MIT, where the hardware was great, but on the software side, it was killed by tons of paperwork… this isn’t just an MIT thing,” Bhatti said.
Those thousands of paper cuts are a sign of the difficulties legacy hardware and software have faced on space missions. Bhatti said the status quo, which dates back to the Apollo era, is to design custom software to maximize the full hardware utility of individual components on a spacecraft. This mode of operation makes sense for single, highly ambitious missions like the Mars rover, but the space industry is rapidly moving toward entire constellations of spacecraft, launched and replicated more rapidly than ever before. It no longer makes sense to write custom software on a per-mission basis.
Two other things have changed: First, computers on the ground have gotten a lot cheaper than they were a decade or two ago. Second, space hardware and components have become commodities. Yet software remains highly custom and manual — which is why Choi and Bhatti think it will be the next big unlock in space.
“Right now we build space missions in hardware, and then all the software and operations and stuff is custom to that hardware. This is a consequence of that. So what Basalt is doing is trying to change that paradigm,” Bhatti said.
It is doing this by creating an operating system for satellite operators called Dispatch: a simulation-based control system that enables software to be portable across different hardware, much like one can run Windows on a laptop manufactured by ASUS or Dell. Bhatti also compared it to Anduril’s Lattice, which enables software-defined control of different vehicles.
Dispatch will enable autonomous spacecraft tasks, allowing operators to coordinate satellites from different fleets, and enable rapid retasking of existing assets in orbit for national security missions. For example, using Dispatch, a national security customer could reassign any nearby satellite running OS to conduct non-Earth imaging in the case of a space security crisis, or to perform Earth imaging in the case of a situation on the ground.
This could enable a degree of operational flexibility never seen before in mission operations. BASALT could also enable users to reuse on-orbit assets or allow unrelated spacecraft to operate together in orbit.
It’s really a paradigm shift, Choi said: “We’re now at this interesting juncture where this hardware-defined industry, which has been space, is turning into a software-defined industry,” he said. “So instead of building constellations, what if you could specify constellations? [What if] Can you put together new assets as well as legacy assets and use them dynamically?
To scale its product and reach a flight legacy, the startup closed a $3.5 million seed round led by Initialized Capital, with contributions from Y Combinator, Liquid2, General Catalyst, and other unnamed VCs this summer. Basalt is going to attempt to hack, recover, and fly around a defunct satellite in orbit to prove out the technology this summer.
From there, the company also plans to build its three-person team and earn its first revenue. Basalt is currently in talks with ten missions, including spacecraft in development as well as hardware already in orbit.
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