HELIOSAEROSPACE

Mass production,
minus the gravity.

Helios builds and runs free-flying factories in low Earth orbit. You rent a bay, send up your process, and we bring product home by the batch, not the sample.

Helios Aerospace · London, about 500 km below the factory Footage: NASA
The big idea

The things that take the most precision to make, like drug crystals, specialty fibre, chip substrates and quantum parts, all share one problem: gravity. For twenty-five years the ISS proved it, a few samples at a time. It retires around 2030. What comes next shouldn't be another lab. It should be a production line.

So we're building the factories.

Gravity is a terrible
coworker.

On Earth, every liquid is quietly churning. Warm bits rise, cool bits sink, heavy bits settle. You'd never notice, unless you're trying to grow a perfect crystal or pull a flawless glass fibre. In orbit all of that stops. Molecules drift in one at a time and line up politely.

On Earth · 1 g
Convection stirs the melt. Heavy particles sink. The crystal grows lopsided, full of defects.
In orbit · ~0.000001 g
Nothing rises, nothing sinks. Particles drift in by diffusion and the lattice builds in order.
Illustrative simulation — not to scale
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We run the spacecraft.
You run the process.

Flying one experiment today means building a whole satellite around it. That's like building a house because you fancy baking a cake. On Helios the house is already there, and every bay comes plugged into the five systems that keep a spacecraft alive.

Helios providesEvery bay
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You bringThat's it
Your payload.
Your process.
Your secret sauce.

We don't make products, because you do what you do best. We keep the lights on, the temperature right and the building pointing the right way. Launch, licensing and ground stations are on us too.

The model

We're space landlords.

Build

We design, build and own the modules. Small, uncrewed, and made to stay up for years.

Let

Each module is split into standard bays, so several tenants share one. No noisy neighbours. It's a vacuum.

Return

Finished product comes home in a capsule. The factory stays up, the bay gets cleared out, and the next tenant moves in.

RoadmapTarget dates
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Helios I CAD model Helios I · flight CAD
Mission 01 · Launch target 2027

Helios I

Think of it as the show home. A 6U satellite that flies our own guidance, power and thermal systems, the same ones every factory bay will run on, before anyone signs a lease.

Its demonstration payload is a thermal imager mapping urban heat islands, with the data published openly.

Status
CDR passed
Proves
GNC · Power · Thermal
Orbit
SSO · ~500 km
Inside the mission →

The people building it

Meet the team →
Richard
Richard
Co-founder · CEO · GNC lead
Natali
Natali
Co-founder · CTO · Power lead
Matthew
Matthew
Chief Strategy Officer · Systems lead
Ben
Ben
Deputy CEO · Mechanical lead
Maria
Maria
Co-founder · Deputy CTO · Thermal lead
Charan
Charan
Co-founder · Procurement lead
Max
Max
Structures lead
Vanshika
Vanshika
Software lead

Got something that wants to be made in orbit?

Pharma, fibre, chips, quantum. Tell us what you're making and we'll tell you what a bay can do for it. Investors and launch partners, come and say hello too.