U.P. company aims to be 'the Ford of satellite engines'

Is there any better example of 20th-century commerce making way for that of the 21st century than this?

Orbion Space Technologies of Houghton, which has received $30 million in venture funding to make plasma-thruster propulsion systems for the new generation of small satellites, has signed a lease for a 10,000-square-foot former Sears retail outlet in the city and will begin manufacturing and testing there this fall when an extensive renovation is finished.

Brad King, Orbion's co-founder and CEO, said the new facility will allow the company to become more vertically integrated and less reliant on contract manufacturing partners to build flight hardware, which will also help reduce long supply-chain lead times that predated any COVID related supply issues.

Orbion, which licenses technology from Michigan Technological University, was founded in August 2016 as King puts it, "by two guys with a napkin sketch." The other guy is Jason Sommerville, who is chief technology officer. Before founding Orbion, they had been executives at Aerophysics Inc., another company in Houghton that researched and designed spacecraft propulsion systems.

Their napkin plan was to commercialize something called the Hall-effect, discovered by E.H. Hall in 1879, which refers to the force created by an electric current flowing through a conductor in a magnetic field. The plan used the Hall-effect to make propulsion systems for small satellites, a market analogous, says King, to what happened when mainframe computers gave way to PCs.

Orbion first made headlines in 2017 when it won the $500,000 grand prize at the eighth annual Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition in Detroit and went on to raise a seed round of $1.36 million.

Orbion raised an A round of funding of $9.2 million in August 2019 and finished raising a B round of $20 million in June 2021.

Institutional investors have included Detroit-based Invest Michigan, Detroit-based Invest Detroit, Grand Rapids-based Wakestream Ventures, Ann Arbor Spark, Boomerang Catapult LLC of Traverse City, Beringea LLC of Farmington Hills, Boston-based Material Impact and San Mateo, Calif.-based Inventus Capital Partners.

Other firms worldwide that have received funding recently for propulsion systems for small satellites include Accion Systems in Boston; Bengaluru, India-based Bellatrix Aerospace; and French startups ExoTrail and ThrustMe.

Source: https://www.crainsdetroit.com/crains-michigan-business/company-aims-be-ford-satellite-engines