For decades, engineers designing space structures have been constrained by the rocket fairing: only hardware that can be folded up to fit inside can go to orbit.
This makes in-space assembly time intensive and expensive. The International Space Station, the largest single object humanity has built in space, was assembled over dozens of launches and cost over $100 billion. And, of course, there is no way to modify or alter the structure once it has been assembled.
Rendezvous Robotics wants to change that.
“If you’re designing a space mission and trying to get a capability to space, you’re constrained by two things,” co-founder and President Joe Landon said in a recent interview. “One, you have to build something that can either fit or fold into a rocket, and you also have to constrain yourself by what satellite bus you’re going to go on. We saw that increasingly, missions need more scale and more size … larger antennas, higher power, and with higher power, the need for larger radiators.”
Instead of astronauts and robotic arms, Rendezvous is betting on autonomous swarm assembly and electromagnetism. The company is commercializing a technology called “tesserae,” flat-packed modular tiles that can launch in dense stacks and magnetically latch to form structures on obit. With a software command, the tiles are designed to unlatch and rearrange themselves when the mission changes.
“They find each other, they communicate… they arrange themselves, come together using magnetic docking and then latch together,” Landon said. “If you want to change that arrangement or replace something or upgrade, you can just send a command … unlatch, move over here, go into storage or come out of storage and we can change the arrangement.”
The current tiles are around the size of a dinner plate and roughly an inch thick …