Hi everyone,
I haven’t posted here in a very long time, mostly because I’ve been heads-down getting a new launch startup off the ground and we had to be “hush hush” somewhat. But I would like to give an introduction for the list.
I am a founder and the COO of Aphelion Aerospace, Inc. Our leadership includes deep industry experience from the Air Force, NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, OneWeb. Our VP of Launch Systems was lead propulsion integration for Blue Origin (even installed the engine on New Shepard the Jeff Bezos flew) and worked for SpaceX in Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon launch integration and support. Our advisors include Scott Hartwig, former CEO of United Space Alliance, and Ed Mango, former Program Manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
Aphelion Aerospace is an early-stage small satellite systems and launch services company based in Colorado. Our goal is to operate a dedicated nanosatellite launch service that allows for regular, scheduled orbital access at an unprecedented high rate and low cost. We are currently expanding our new facility and HQ in Denver so we can continue to mature technologies and transition into large-scale hardware production.
For the past three years, the team has been developing technologies to enable a complete end-to-end solution for low-cost space access using a propulsion system that will be the first in the U.S. to utilize a new “green” non-toxic and environmentally-friendly hypergolic bipropellant in an operational system. This will enable very low system cost, minimal infrastructure requirements and low launch costs. A lot of our tech is proprietary but I can say that our oxidizer uses RGHP and the fuel is NOT petroleum-based (e.g. RP1, Kerosene, etc.).
We are also developing commercial avionics and autonomous flight safety systems as well as cubesat component hardware as part of the objective to offer end-to-end cubesat launch services and support to customers across industries.
Our next full-scale propulsion hotfire test campaign is planned for November with our partner Frontier Astronautics at their test facility in Wyoming. We’re also in the process of raising our next round of VC investment. While we’re pursuing traditional funding, we also decided to open up our mission to everyday people by launching a Reg CF equity crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine that just launched. I’m not soliciting here, but want to emphasize that we’re not a startup with nothing but paper designs.
I’m looking forward to sharing more with the list as we progress and are more publicly visible with our technology. I do invite everyone to visit our website if you are at all curious about what we’re doing and feel free to shoot me an email with questions too:
https://aphelionaerospace.com
Thanks!
Matthew Travis, President / COO
Aphelion Aerospace, Inc.
Matthew.travis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx