K2 Space is betting that the future of the space hardware will be big — really big.
The startup is building massive spacecraft under the assumption that launch costs will continue to drop as SpaceX’s Starship and other heavy-lift vehicles come online. It looks like the Space Force is taking up their side of that bet, with K2 Space announcing Thursday that its first full satellite mission will fly a number of Department of Defence payloads under a $60 million contract.
That mission, called Gravitas, will fly no earlier than February 2026. The satellite will fly on SpaceX’s Transporter-16 rideshare mission, where it will carry multiple national security payloads. The spacecraft will conduct operations in low Earth orbit (LEO) before raising its orbit to medium Earth orbit (MEO). MEO, which is between LEO and geosynchronous orbit, has “historically been an incredibly challenging orbit to operate in,” K2 Space co-founder and CEO Karan Kunjur said in an interview.
To even get there, spacecraft operators typically either need to equip their satellites with powerful propulsion systems or pay a premium for a launch that takes them directly to the target orbit. Once there, the spacecraft must be capable of surviving the high radiation environment for the duration of the mission. But the Space Force has been building out assets in MEO, primarily for missile tracking and warning, but also to enhance the Global Positioning System (GPS) network.
“MEO offers another level of resilience,” Kunjur said. “If you think about a multi-orbit strategy or multi-orbit architecture, what you want, if you want resilience, is to have assets that are in LEO, assets that are in MEO, and assets that are in GEO. We really at K2 believe in that future.”
Kunjur, who founded the company with his brother Neel, called the contract a “step change …