By Angus Dalton
The largest private satellite built in Australia was blasted into space attached to a SpaceX rocket in March, swaddled in a thermal blanket made by a designer who normally fashions violin bags and umbrellas.
The 270-kilogram Optimus craft was a “trailblazing satellite to clean up space junk”, and could refuel, repair and deorbit old satellites from a critically crowded cosmos, according to Austrade.
An artist’s impression of the Optimus satellite or “space taxi”, designed to service and reposition satellites and spacecraft.Credit: Space Machines Company
But once Optimus reached orbit, its makers from Sydney start-up Space Machines Company (SMC) couldn’t establish communications with the satellite. Australia’s biggest commercial spacecraft had gone dark.
“The key issue was post-launch operations,” Rajat Kulshrestha, chief executive of SMC, said ahead of their announcement on Thursday of a new kind of satellite.
Optimus peeled off the Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket with a flurry of 53 other spacecraft, he said, complicating how quickly the company could find the satellite and attempt to establish contact.
“It took us about four weeks to get that sorted for a whole bunch of reasons. And we’re not the only ones. There’s about 30 satellites which have faced the same issue,” Kulshrestha said.
By that point, contact with the craft could not be maintained.
Optimus carried payloads including printed solar cell technology from CSIRO, a world-first space computer inspired by the human brain and a pioneering propulsion system.
The satellite is now one of 35,000 large objects – including 26,000 chunks of debris and about 9000 active satellites – hurtling around Earth.
There are another million pieces of debris smaller than 10 centimetres but capable of inflicting catastrophic damage if satellites and space stations were struck, according to the European Space Agency.
The spiralling glut of debris poses an existential threat to the space infrastructure we depend on for communication, GPS and security.
Now SMC is preparing for the launch of a new kind of “roadside assistance” satellite to help protect and help other craft amid the looming crisis of space congestion and security threats.
The smaller Optimus Viper satellite is a rapid-response vehicle that can get close to spacecraft that have been damaged or attacked, scan them with LIDAR and optical sensors and relay data back to Earth.
“When an accident happens and the ambulance gets there straight away, they’re not going to be the ones that do the surgery. They assess the situation to figure out what’s next,” Kulshrestha said.
Space Machines Company’s new Optimus Viper satellite (left) is built to rapidly inspect other spacecraft.Credit: Space Machines Company
“That’s the vision of the company – to be those first responders for security and sustainability of space operations.”
They’ve learned from Optimus. “We’re putting in an extra beacon that will allow us to, within a few minutes, identify the spacecraft as soon as it gets to orbit,” Kulshrestha said.
Viper could inspect other spacecraft for less than $5 million, whereas other such inspection services can cost tens of millions of dollars. SMC plans to use Viper to check on Optimus, Kulshrestha added.
The company is also building a second 500 kilogram Optimus satellite to be launched by NewSpace India Limited in 2026, backed by $8.5 million from the government.
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