If everything goes to plan, Gilmour Space Technologies’ ElaraSat satellite bus will be lifted to low earth orbit on Monday as a rideshare customer aboard the next SpaceX Transporter-14 launch.
ElaraSat is a 100-kilogram, multi-mission satellite (MMS) platform built on the Gold Coast by Gilmour. The first-time mission is called MMS-1 and will be carried aboard a Falcon-9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The Australian designed and built satellite bus marks a milestone for Australia sovereign space capability.
The bus will carry a customer payload from the national science agency CSIRO, a hyperspectral imager designed to monitor water quality from space.
In future, Gilmour Space Technologies hopes to use the ElaraSat satellite bus to carry payloads for customers using its Eris launch vehicle to access low earth orbit.
“It is a little strange [in that] we are a rocket company that has put a satellite on somebody else’s rocket,” Gilmour chief executive Adam Gilmour told InnovationAus.com.
“But mainly because we didn’t want to have our satellite program [forced to] wait for the launch business to get going,” he said. “We want to prove-out the technology.”
“But we obviously do intend to launch these satellites on our own launch vehicles in the future.”
The first Eris test flight is expected to launch from Gilmour’s Bowen Orbital Spaceport in the coming weeks. The company is expected to announce its NET (no earlier than) date for the long-anticipated test-flight in the coming days.
The design and development of ElaraSat bus has been conducted over the past couple of years in parallel with the Eris vehicle.
“We realised a few years ago was there was a big demand for satellite busses,” Gilmour Mr Gilmour said.
“A lot of customers had developed payloads, whether that’s an optical camera, an infrared camera, a hyper spectral camera, or a communication system … and then they either have to build their own [satellite bus] or go and find someone else to do it.”
A lot of startups were burning capital on their satellite bus and not leaving a lot of money for launch.
The company decided if they could develop and build a flexible enough and relatively inexpensive bus, they could build a business from it.
ElaraSat will enable the company to offer sovereign access to space to a full range of customers, from Defence to startups.
The ElaraSat MMS-1 million is being carried via Exolaunch, a launch mission management, satellite integration and deployment services company.
Exolaunch will deploy 45 customer satellites on the Transporter-14 rideshare mission.
Transporter-14 is a dedicated smallsat rideshare mission with a total of 70 payloads on the flight. These include cubesats, microsats, re-entry capsules, and orbital transfer vehicles carrying three of those payloads to be deployed at a later time. Transporter-14 will be the 26th flight of the first stage booster used to support the mission.
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