NewOrbit Space: The Startup Building Earth’s Lowest Orbiting Satellites

There is a small office in Reading, a town 36 miles west of London. Nothing about it screams space company. No glass atrium. No lab coat-wearing staff visible through floor-to-ceiling windows. Just 22 engineers working in a modest business estate, building something that genuinely has not existed before. That company is NewOrbit Space. And what they are building might be the most audacious bet in aerospace right now.

What Is NewOrbit Space and Who Founded It

NewOrbit Space is a British aerospace startup founded in 2021, headquartered in Reading, United Kingdom. The company was co-founded by Anatolii Papulov, who serves as CEO, and Ruslan Rakhimov, who serves as CTO. The mission, in plain terms, is to build and operate satellites in what is called Ultra Low Earth Orbit (ULEO) – altitudes between 180 and 250 kilometres above Earth’s surface.

Now, here is the kicker. Most conventional Low Earth Orbit satellites fly at around 550 kilometres. The International Space Station sits at roughly 400 kilometres. NewOrbit Space wants to fly a full third lower than anything commercially sustained before. That is not an incremental improvement. That is a completely different category.

The team has grown to around 29 people as of 2025. Some of them worked on Mars rovers. One helped SpaceX rockets land. Another came from Formula 1 engineering. Sifted listed NewOrbit as one of the top European startups to watch. And yet, they are doing all of this from a plain office park in Berkshire.

That contrast, honestly, is part of what makes the story interesting.

How NewOrbit Space’s Ultra-Low Earth Orbit Satellites Work

The reality is, there is a simple reason no one has commercially operated satellites this low before. It is called atmospheric drag. Below 300 kilometres, Earth’s atmosphere is thick enough to create real friction on any spacecraft. That friction slows the satellite. Gravity does the rest. Without a solution to drag, your satellite falls out of orbit in days.

So why bother flying this low at all? Because the closer you are to Earth, the better everything gets.

NewOrbit Space satellites fly at 180 to 220 kilometres. At that altitude, the company claims they can triple the resolution of conventional satellite imagery. Communication power requirements drop by up to 16 times. Satellite aperture diameter shrinks by a factor of four, which directly cuts construction cost and complexity. Launch costs per kilogram fall by around 30%. And development time for the satellites is three times faster than building conventional alternatives.

Think about what that means practically. Sharper pictures from space. Faster data. Lower costs. Direct satellite-to-device connectivity that could eventually bypass ground receivers entirely. Better weather data from atmospheric layers that standard satellites simply fly too high to access.

And none of this works without solving drag. Which is exactly where NewOrbit’s core technology comes in.

The Air-Breathing Engine: NewOrbit’s Breakthrough Technology

This is the part that tends to stop people mid-sentence when they hear it for the first time.

NewOrbit Space has developed what it calls an air-breathing propulsion system. The basic idea: instead of carrying heavy fuel into orbit, the satellite harvests atmospheric particles around it and uses them as propellant. The very thing that would destroy a normal satellite, the thin atmosphere at 180 kilometres, becomes the thing that keeps this one alive.

It is genuinely elegant engineering. A closed-loop solution to a problem that has kept this orbital zone empty for decades.

A working prototype is being tested inside a custom vacuum chamber at the Reading facility. The chamber simulates the pressure conditions of ultra-low Earth orbit. Daniel Niemi, partner at Atlantic Labs, called the technology something that “could well be the biggest breakthrough since the introduction of reusable rockets by SpaceX.” That is not a throwaway quote from a pitch deck. That is an investor who has seen the inside of a lot of aerospace companies making a very direct comparison.

NewOrbit markets two core products built around this approach. The NEO-1 is the satellite platform designed for ULEO operations at 180 kilometres altitude, built for a five-year lifespan. The AURA Thruster is the air-breathing propulsion unit that makes that lifespan possible. Both are proprietary. And both are designed so that when the satellite reaches end of life, it disintegrates and vanishes within months. No debris left behind.

NewOrbit Space Funding: How Much Has It Raised and From Whom

NewOrbit Space has raised approximately $9.3 million in total funding across multiple rounds since 2021.

The headline round was a $7.5 million seed raise in March 2024, led by Yes VC, with Atlantic Labs, Lifeline Ventures, and Offline Ventures participating. Rafal Modrzewski, co-founder of Finnish satellite company Iceye, also invested. When a founder who has actually built and operated a satellite constellation puts personal money into your company, that says something that a standard press release cannot.

The company has also received support from Creative Destruction Lab and the University of Toronto, along with backing from the UK Space Agency, which brought NewOrbit into a preparation programme ahead of its first in-orbit demonstration mission.

Let’s be honest about the funding picture though. $9.3 million is not a lot of money by spacetech standards. US-based Albedo Space, which is chasing a similar low-orbit thesis, has raised over $130 million and counts Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures among its backers. NewOrbit is running lean. That is partly a reflection of where they are in the build cycle. But it also means they have more to prove before the big capital rounds come.

What Problems Does NewOrbit Space Solve for Businesses

The commercial case for NewOrbit Space is not abstract. It is grounded in very specific gaps that exist today.

Papulov talks about a 2015 case involving a Maxar Technologies satellite that cost around $1 billion to build. That satellite captured an image of a fishing vessel so sharp that it proved enslaved people were on board. Around 2,000 people were rescued as a result. One picture. His argument is simple: if you can bring the cost of that capability down 100 times, the use cases stop being limited to billion-dollar government programmes and start reaching NGOs, smaller governments, humanitarian organisations, and private companies.

That is the real pitch. Not just better satellites. More accessible capability.

On the revenue side, NewOrbit Space operates a Satellite as a Service business model. It serves clients in geospatial imaging and telecommunications. The applications include drone-quality satellite imagery for agriculture, infrastructure monitoring, and urban planning. Precise weather data pulled from altitudes that existing satellites cannot reach. Direct satellite-to-device connectivity for areas without ground infrastructure. And faster, lower-latency data transmission for telecommunications clients who need it.

The business generates revenue through the sale and deployment of satellite solutions. That is the commercial engine sitting underneath the engineering story.

NewOrbit Space vs. Competitors: How It Stands Out

NewOrbit Space sits inside a market with around 168 active competitors, according to Tracxn. Names like Terran Orbital, Apex, ReOrbit, Kreios Space, and Sitael are in the mix. But the real comparison is with Albedo Space.

Albedo is the furthest-along competitor pursuing the low-orbit imaging thesis. They plan to fly at approximately 320 kilometres – lower than anyone else operating commercially today. Their goal is to produce 10-centimetre resolution imagery of nearly anywhere on Earth, using a constellation of up to 24 satellites. That is impressive.

But NewOrbit Space is aiming for 180 kilometres. That is 140 kilometres lower than Albedo. And at these altitudes, every kilometre of difference in orbital height translates directly into better images, lower latency, and richer atmospheric data. So if NewOrbit actually gets there and makes it work, they are not just competitive with Albedo. They are operating in a fundamentally different tier.

The other thing that separates NewOrbit Space from most competitors is its stance on debris. NASA estimates there are over 28,000 pieces of debris larger than a tennis ball in low Earth orbit, plus over 100 million fragments the size of a pea. All of it is travelling at roughly 17,500 miles per hour. The risk of a cascade collision event, what researchers call Kessler Syndrome, grows with every new satellite launch. Experts at the European Space Agency have described an unchecked version of this scenario as similar to the aftermath of a nuclear war in terms of orbital usability.

NewOrbit’s self-deorbiting satellites do not add to that problem. They dissolve. That is a genuine product differentiator in a sector where sustainability is becoming a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.

NewOrbit Space’s Future Plans and First Mission

NewOrbit Space is preparing for its first in-orbit demonstration mission. Papulov indicated that a launch date announcement was expected in 2025. The company is working with the UK Space Agency through a structured preparation programme to get there.

The demonstration mission is the defining moment. Everything NewOrbit has built, the NEO-1 platform, the AURA Thruster, the years of testing inside a vacuum chamber in Reading, it all needs to work in the actual conditions of ultra-low Earth orbit. If it does, it validates the entire technical thesis. If it does not, they go back and fix it.

That is how deep tech works. You build. You test. You fail sometimes. You fix it and go again.

Looking further out, NewOrbit Space is building toward a constellation of ULEO satellites that would serve imaging, connectivity, and climate monitoring applications globally. The founding vision is clear: engineer Earth’s lowest orbiting satellites to advance global connectivity and Earth observation at a cost and scale that existing infrastructure cannot match.

The most valuable real estate in space has been empty for decades. Not because it was unreachable. Because no one had built the right engine to stay there. NewOrbit Space thinks they have.

NewOrbit Space Business Model

NewOrbit Space Raised $18.5M.