Hummingbird Space Exploration

This was the first attempt to establish a company in the space sector. Together with Tan Zu Payen (Boleh Rockets) we came up with the idea of a small, standardized and re-usable spacecraft for operations in Low-Earth-Orbit. The spacecraft is sized to be launched with a Rocket Lab Electron rocket leveraging the growing small-launcher market. It is outfitted with a thermal protection system to allow the return of experiments, samples and other items from space to earth.

Making spacecraft economically viable is still a challenge and we tried to tackle it with this spacecraft concept from two angles. One is the standardization of the payload bus, so that potential customers could concentrate fully on the design of their experiment or instrument they would want to fly. The spacecraft has certain pre-specified capabilities that the customers can make use of but do not have to worry about developing or implementing, i.e. taking the current ride-share concept one step further. The second angle goes hand in hand with space debris mitigation. As the Hummingbird can return to earth, we implemented a simple system to capture smaller pieces of space debris. Upon return to earth, these pieces could be sold to collectors or back to the original owners of the debris, if they can be identified.

The business case makes use of the projected massive increase in small-sat and small launcher utilization as well as the need to take care of the space debris issue and people’s fascination with space-age artifacts. An interesting fact, making our business case more viable, is that a lot of small sats have very low functionality with respect to larger satellites, i.e. subsystems such as orbital or attitude control are completely missing in favor of simplicity and lower cost. However, this also leads to higher mission failure rates and limits small sat capabilities, which is part of what we wanted to address. There are, however, important legal issues that would have to be resolved before the selling of any sort of space debris could actually take place.

We took part in the 2017 New Space Business Plan competition in St. Louis with THIS presentation of the Hummingbird concept. Unfortunately, we did not win the finals and currently the concept and its further development are dormant.

Nonetheless, there are now several concepts by smaller and established companies trying implement the concept of standardized payload buses (e.g. Rocket Lab Photon) or trying to extend this concept to satellite refueling and maintenance (e.g. SSL, Orbit Fab), i.e. to extend satellite lifetime.