One hundred propulsion systems in orbit. That was the milestone ThrustMe crossed in June 2025 when its hardware rode a SpaceX Transporter-14 mission to low Earth orbit. For a company founded eight years earlier in a French plasma physics lab, the number marks a transition from demonstration to industrial scale.
Dr. Ane Aanesland co-founded ThrustMe in 2017 with fellow physicist Dmytro Rafalskyi, spinning the company out of research she led at École Polytechnique’s Laboratory of Plasma Physics, where she headed a 30-person group focused on electric propulsion. Her academic credentials are formidable: a PhD in plasma physics from the Arctic University of Norway, more than 60 refereed journal papers, four patents, and the CNRS Innovation Medal in 2019 for translating laboratory science into commercial hardware.
The hardware in question uses iodine as propellant, a choice that sounds exotic but solves a practical problem. Iodine is solid at room temperature, which eliminates the high-pressure tanks and complex plumbing that conventional xenon systems require. That simplicity translates directly into lower mass, lower cost, and faster integration for satellite manufacturers building at volume. ThrustMe was the first company to demonstrate iodine electric propulsion in orbit, and the technology has since attracted customers from CNES, which placed a direct order for off-the-shelf propulsion units in early 2024, to a partnership with ONERA and Airbus Defence & Space exploring iodine propulsion for larger satellite platforms.
The company’s growth has accelerated sharply. ThrustMe surpassed 200 orders by October 2023, doubling its order book in four months. In July 2025, it announced a strategic partnership with Marble Imaging and Reflex Aerospace for an in-orbit demonstration of the JPT150, its first low-power iodine Hall thruster. And in April 2026, ThrustMe signed contracts worth over €10 million to equip 40 Japanese Earth observation satellites with its propulsion systems, a deal announced during President Macron’s visit to Japan.
Propulsion is where sustainability rhetoric meets engineering reality. Without reliable, affordable maneuverability, satellites cannot comply with post-mission disposal guidelines, avoid collisions, or support the active debris removal missions that regulators are beginning to mandate. At SmallSat Europe, Aanesland joins a panel titled “The Market for Orbital Environmental Services and Active Debris Removal” alongside Quilty Space Co-CEO Chris Quilty, Astroscale US EVP Dr. Clare Martin, Morpheus Space CEO and co-founder Daniel Bock, and Ion-X CCO Pierre-Jean Poirot. The session examines how orbital environmental services are transitioning from concept to commercial implementation, covering the economic models, regulatory drivers, and technology readiness that will determine whether the debris cleanup market becomes a real business.
Aanesland’s perspective on that panel is distinct: she builds the engines that make compliance possible. The question is whether the market will value that capability before the orbital environment forces it to.
