New Company Audacy Plans For The Moon

A new California-based company called Audacy is planning on closing a Series A fundraising round of $15 million to create three satellites and two Earth stations. The company's goal is to raise four major rounds of funding to build the ground stations and launch their said satellites by 2019 - to a plan that could cost about $750 million.

New space startup Audacy shoots for the Moon. https://t.co/KHuohhtfRo

— Alice Gorman (@drspacejunk) July 28, 2016

What is the aim of this mission? According to Space.com, the three satellites that Audacy is planning to build will support 2,000 cubesats, which would all work at the same time anywhere in Earth Orbit. Alternatively, it could also have up to 12 high-capacity customers and 1,000 smaller ones sharing the bandwidth simultaneously. In other words, that are aiming to provide spacecraft operators with continuous communications access to their separate data while in orbit - or have a workable cellphone communications system in space.

CEO Ralf Ewig said that given the right capacity, the company could help Earth-observation companies like Urthecast and Planet Labs send data back to their customers, and even help spacecraft-launching firms keep a better eye on their rockets, even help internet service providers keep track of large constellations of satellites.

Their goal is provide a network that is similar to NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, which was built for a space shuttle but is now used by the ISS for supporting cargo ships like that of Space X's Dragon capsule.

Ewig has had experience working on operations - he used to be an operations engineer for Space X in 2010, and he thought of creating an alternative for the communications used by the Dragon Spacecraft. He shared that the TDRSS lacks the capacity to support new launch providers.

World News Report noted that Ewig thinks the TDRSS lacks the capacity to support hundreds of new launch providers, as well.