A plan to protect commercial satellites in low Earth orbit from space debris spawned at a Menlo Park research facility has received a $4 million investment boost.
LeoLabs, a company spun out of radar research conducted over a number of years at SRI International in Menlo Park as it investigated the Earth’s ionosphere, on Feb. 28 announced it had closed the $4 million funding round backed by a number of global investors, including SRI, Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures and Airbus Ventures, which has offices in San Jose and Paris. LeoLabs CEO and founder Daniel Ceperley is SRI’s former program director.
The money boost should be good news for future space tourists, something that Ceperley hints at in a news release. On Feb. 27, SpaceX announced it plans to fly two space tourists on a trip around the moon in 2018.
“What we are witnessing is the birth of the LEO (low Earth orbit) ecosystem and the rise of a LEO economy, ranging from real time imaging to communications to space tourism,” Ceperley said in a news release. “To ensure operations, this ecosystem needs to be securely managed.”
The Menlo Park-based company currently tracks roughly 13,000 objects on a continual basis, with plans to go as high as 250,000, which is the estimated amount of objects in near space. The international space station and all man-made satellites operate in this zone, which runs from roughly 100 miles to 1,200 miles above the planet.
LeoLabs also announced that it has added the Midland Space Radar facility in Midland, Texas, to its network of ground-based facilities. The company needs to expand its radar network to allow it to track all the near-Earth objects.
