We’re trying to revolutionise most of it… because at the moment everything we use in space has to be built on earth and launched in one piece on a rocket big enough to launch it one piece… and made tough enough to be launched on a violently shaking rocket… and everything has to be made bulletproof because once it’s up there it’s impossible to repair… all of which makes basically any space construction project extremely expensive to engineer… the only shortcuts are mass production of identical disposable units like planet labs doves or spacex starlink… which are kind of wasteful but work if you have a cheap enough ride into space…

But building anything in space is a massive set of challenges of its own … a space station module requires skilled welding of a pressure vessel, fitting a satellite requires careful cable management and manipulation of sensitive components… low earth orbit is practically a low density oxygen plasma compared to higher orbits (and oxygen plasma will oxidise just about anything given enough time) …

We analysed a lot of options and ended up designing (and are slowly building due to limited budget) a modular system of robotic spacecraft designed to work together in teams like a construction or assembly team, able to work on larger projects like space station modules or simple things like assembling a cubesat from a bin of parts… and designed to handle both construction and maintenance so that we can provide value to the massive amount of existing assets already in space, and because it’s a multi element system capable of maintenance and repair work, each robot can be more low cost and straightforward, like a Bobcat you can fit a bucket or dozer blade or jackhammer or claw to… they can swap tools on each other just like when you use one bobcat to lift a heavy tool up off the ground for attachment to another bobcat, and when one breaks the others can open it up and replace what’s broken…

It seems a lot more complicated when it’s described out in terms of capabilities, but fundamentally there’s a small number of modular components and a handful of support systems that are much simpler than the primary robot platform units are.

The website doesn’t have a lot of PR material at the moment since most of the effort is still on engineering design and prototyping work, but the website https://www.tetraorbital.com will have more information when we have stuff to show, it also has contact info for more specific enquires, and the mailing list is a zero fluff no spam future announcement only list (we’ve literally not sent a single message to it yet since there’s no PR or announcement material to share yet)