BOTHELL, Wash. — From the outside, Portal Space Systems’ headquarters looks like a standard-issue office space in a Bothell business park. But inside, the Portal team is working to harness the heat of the sun, to speed up how spacecraft get around.
“Think about it as finally bringing what you see in Star Trek into reality in orbit, to actually move spacecraft the way Hollywood had originally intended,” Jeff Thornburg, Portal’s CEO and co-founder, said at today’s ribbon-cutting ceremony for the 8,000-square-foot development lab and HQ.
The hardware that’s spread across Portal’s lab tells you that the four-year-old venture is no typical business-park tenant: In one corner, there’s a gleaming vacuum chamber where components for Portal’s solar thermal propulsion system are being tested. In another corner, a 3D printer stands ready to turn out the parts for subscale test models of the system’s heat-exchanger thruster.
Portal plans to build the system into its Supernova satellite platform. Supernova is designed to use foldable mirrors to focus the sun’s rays onto the propulsion system’s heat exchanger. When ammonia passes through the heat exchanger, it rapidly builds up pressure and produces thrust.
Thornburg said the system provides several advantages over traditional rocket thrusters. For example, there’s no need for oxidizers or hard-to-handle cryogenic fuels. “We’re not burning anything,” Thornburg said. “We’re just concentrating the solar energy.”
The biggest advantage is that Supernova should be able to push itself and its attached payload into different orbits much more quickly than your typical spacecraft.
“It has the ability to maneuver like nothing else that exists in orbit, which means it can go from low Earth orbit or medium Earth orbit to geostationary orbits within hours or a day,” Thornburg said. “Or it can move from one orbit to another quickly to accomplish a commercial or a defense mission with speeds that typically take weeks and months.”
Thornburg’s engineering résumé includes stints at NASA, SpaceX, Stratolaunch and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, plus a role as CEO and founder of Interstellar Technologies. He co-founded Portal in 2021, along with Ian Vorbach and Prashaanth Ravindran.
“This company was started in the garage of my house in Bothell, with my wife finding out that I started yet another space company by surprise when mail arrived for Portal Space Systems in the inbox,” Thornburg recalled.
Portal began leasing the Bothell facility last year, and the workspace was re-engineered to accommodate a high-powered electrical induction system that simulates the sun’s heating power. Ravindran, who serves as Portal’s vice president of engineering, said the system can heat up components in the lab’s vacuum chamber to 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,700 degrees Fahrenheit) over the course of 15 to 20 seconds.
The company plans to start testing Supernova’s 3D-printed heat-exchanger thruster by the middle of this year. Thornburg said the first demonstrator spacecraft is due to launch next year, with a payload that will try out technologies aimed at improving space situational awareness.
Situational awareness and the capacity to change orbits rapidly are becoming increasingly important issues, due in part to the rapid proliferation of satellites in low Earth orbit, or LEO. Over the past decade, the number of active satellites in LEO has risen from 1,300 to more than 10,000 — and as many as 70,000 satellites could be launched to LEO over the next five years.
Another factor has to do with potential threats from America’s space rivals, China and Russia. This month, Pentagon officials warned that the Russians appeared to be maneuvering their satellites to practice “attack and defend tactics” in LEO. “The threat posture on orbit is much worse than most people realize,” Thornburg said.
He said Supernova’s orbit-changing capabilities could help U.S. satellites dodge threats from attacking satellites, or go after the satellites that pose such threats: “If you have the type of speed that we have, they’re not going to know what’s coming.”
Thornburg said Portal’s workforce currently consists of 35 employees and contractors. “We’ll have other engineers that are joining the team here in the next few weeks and months,” he said. So far, the company has raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding. It has also received $5.5 million in small-business research grants, leading up to a $45 million boost orchestrated through the SpaceWERX STRATFI program.
At today’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, Portal received a boost from U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash. “It’s really exciting that you chose our region and all the resources that are here to support you,” DelBene said. “Folks come here because we have an incredible workforce. We have the innovation infrastructure to help support growth. It’s part of our DNA.”
Bothell Mayor Mason Thompson offered a welcome as well.
“We are legitimately happy that you are here,” he said. “We get to have aerospace along with our thriving life-science sector, and the first quantum computing manufacturer in the country. We’ve got a couple of different colleges, and we really hope that this is a place that can grow with you. … We can support you as you go from a garage, to your first facility, to beyond.”
Thornburg said the Bothell facility will be a “long-term R&D center for Portal.”
“We’re working with some of our customers on building up our manufacturing capabilities,” he said. “Over the next couple of years, we’ll be able to produce 12 spacecraft a year.”
After the ceremony, Thornburg told GeekWire that the site for the Supernova manufacturing facility could be chosen later this year, and that the team was looking at potential sites in the area between Bothell and Arlington.
“The proximity to Seattle is exactly right,” he said.
