Aquarian Space has successfully raised a seed round led by Draper Associates — this funding will accelerate development plans for Aquarian Space’s SOLNET™, which will offer critical high-speed internet and communications for beyond-Earth operations.
High-speed internet drives communication on Earth; however, this fast and reliable network ends with the geostationary orbit. Above Earth’s orbit, current communication is reliant on technology dating back to the 1960’s and that makes downloading lunar and deep space data an extremely slow process. With the lunar economy in fast development, driven by NASA’s Artemis program, a lack of high-speed communication poses a serious bottleneck for lunar operations and future Mars exploration.
Aquarian Space is solving this problem by setting up communications between Earth, the Moon, Mars and beyond, by building commercial high data rate, high-speed delivery satellite networks enabling 100 Mbps Moon to Earth speeds 24/7. This is synonymous for space operations going from dial-up to high-speed, and would make streaming 4K videos possible from the Moon.
Aquarian Space is currently conducting technical reviews with several commercial providers for the NASA CLPS Mission, other US lunar commercial explorers and international lunar missions to bring end-to-end data and communication services by 2024. Customers are not required to change or update technology on their end to integrate with Aquarian’s network making this a very easy and affordable solution.
“In 2021 there were 13 landers, orbiters and rovers on and around the Moon,” said Kelly Larson, CEO of Aquarian Space. “By 2030, we will have around 200 creating a multi-billion dollar lunar economy. But this can’t happen without solid reliable Earth-to-Moon communications. Having Draper Associates invest in us is powerful,” said Larson. “Not only does it accelerate our development planning, but it means they believe in our mission to create the long overdue interplanetary communications infrastructure needed for the next wave of lunar and deep space exploration.”
“We think it’s high time that our solar system got high-speed internet access,” said Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Partner of Draper Associates. “The team at Aquarian Space has the vision to make it happen and we at Draper Associates are thrilled to be along for the journey.”
This announcement follows Aquarian Space’s successful completion of Seraphim Space Camp, an accelerator run by Seraphim Capital, who said of Aquarian’s Mission 8 cohort, “These six early-stage startups have been selected from a pipeline of 1,500 companies and represent the top 2% of seed-stage SpaceTech startups we view in our global deal flow at Seraphim.”
Funding by Draper Associates soon followed and that will allow Aquarian to grow their team, which already includes decades of aerospace technology leadership, experience on more than 50 missions and a partnership with CREAN, Inc., a leader in innovative aerospace engineering.
