As we head into the holiday season, it’s nearly time to farewell 2023, and it’s not an easy year to cover. Unfortunately, we were not successful at raising our seed round that might have funded the first stage of development for our Carousel Spacelab: it was to be the centrepiece of a logistics system for In-Space Manufacturing (ISM), where high value physical products can be made in space for use on Earth.
For now, we put on hold our efforts to advance zero-gravity manufacturing – worth as much as $86 Billion dollars per year to the pharmaceutical industry alone – and will retain our IP for future use. To summarise: The Carousel Spacelab concept is a small, free-flying spacecraft that can host and centrifuge customer payloads in the cubesat form-factor, helping to solve the key handling, scheduling and safety constraints of working in space, leading to the kinds of efficiency gains necessary to make commercial low-Earth orbit development viable.
- Zero-gravity in space is useful, but creates numerous issues that currently require manual handling by astronauts
- The killer app for space is not zero-gravity, but control over gravity
Instead, we have spent the last six months developing our next concept – created in response to one of the challenges at the Hackathon we ran in 2022 – and this will be known as the Exodus Pathfinder project.
Equal parts sandbox-simulator, citizen-science project, and homage to 90s computer games, we are aiming for a simple enough user interface that navigating around the real solar system will be great fun, while also generating a database of trajectories that could actually be useful to future astronaut crews. Based on real planet and asteroid data sourced from publicly available databases, we aim to inspire and educate. Stand by, there’s more to come…
Exodus Space Systems 