Santa Fe firm wants to take the internet to outer space

Solstar Space Co. wants to bring commercial internet technology to outer space.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. Spacecraft fly fast, really fast, and they have limited internet access via government satellites, said Solstar Space CEO Brian Barnett.

Santa Fe-based Solstar has developed connectivity technology to allow for broadband, narrow-band and Wi-Fi access between manned and unmanned spacecraft and ground stations.

Since 2017, Solstar has been in what the tech world calls the research and development phase. Barnett’s team has three communications products to give space travelers the same ease at internet access, sending and receiving videos and talking to ground stations as anyone else has with internet access on their smartphone or laptop.

Space communication has delays and gaps. Solstar’s space-age internet technology hopes to bring it to near real-time.

“We like to say we are connecting space to the worldwide web,” Barnett said. “The space station is using satellites [launched] as far back as the 1980s.”

Six years after its start, Barnett believes he sees the light at the end of the tunnel with commercialization — selling the Solstar products on the open market. He’s banking on Air Force and Space Force contracts, but is just as interested in other U.S. and international space agencies and private-sector space companies.

“The government is retiring government broadband satellites and replacing them with commercial satellites,” Barnett said. “We’re the internet service provider.”

Solstar in November was awarded a $75,000 Phase 1 Small Business Technology Transfer contract by the U.S. Air Force, which evaluated the basic merits of the company’s Slayton Space Communicator — a broadband network device for space use.

Barnett said landing the Phase 1 contract was highly competitive, and the upcoming application for a Phase 2 STTR grant will be just as competitive, with many entrepreneurs pitching different technologies.

“The Space Force and Air Force have to agree they need our technology,” Barnett said. “The Air

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The government is retiring government broadband satellites and replacing them with commercial satellites. We’re the internet service provider.” Solstar Space CEO Brian Barnett

Force tasked the private sector for all kinds of ideas.”

Solstar has collaborated with Andrei Zagrai, a mechanical engineering professor at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, for the initiative.

Solstar is funded with $2 million in outside private equity and crowdfunded money. The three Solstar products are the Slayton Space Communicator, the Walker Wi-Fi node being developed for space stations but also useable on satellites, and the Deke Space Communicator, a narrow-band network device. One use for Deke is to allow real-time communication between ground stations and satellites as they are being decommissioned.

“We hope to commercialize our first product by the end of 2024,” Barnett said.

Deke and Slayton have not been in space. Barnett believes Walker Wi-Fi could be the first Solstar product in space, possibly by the end of 2024, aboard a Northrop Grumman Habitation and Logistics Outpost module for NASA’s lunar Gateway program. Barnett’s prior company, Satwest, in the 2010s had several devices aboard craft traveling in lowEarth orbit below 100,000 feet.