Maybe you heard a loud boom while walking down Sierra Street. Maybe you saw our pictures from testing a new kind of spacecraft thruster. Or maybe you saw the branded umbrellas at Smoky Hollow Coffee.
General Galactic is a seed-stage startup in the heart of El Segundo, California. We’re a team from SpaceX, Varda, Relativity, Planet, and more commercial space startups developing a new mobility layer for space travel. For the last year we’ve built, tested, learned, and re-built tech that experts told us was “impossible” to accomplish outside of a research lab.
In-space mobility is the bottleneck to a sci-fi future
The commercial space economy has transformed from a fledgling industry to the crown jewel of the American hard-tech renaissance, and is poised to represent trillions in value in the 2030s.
A revolution in access to orbit has occurred thanks to launch vehicles like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab’s Electron. But most of the value generation in the space economy occurs once those vehicles have deployed their payload in orbit.
Once a spacecraft separates from a launch vehicle, an in-space propulsion system takes over and carries you wherever you aim to go. It’s generally the most expensive, complex, and unreliable part of any spacecraft. Using these systems to access a higher energy orbit (basically, anything other than the trajectory you got dropped off on in) is drastically more expensive per kilogram of spacecraft mass than a launch to a standard trajectory alone. As such, relatively few missions today go beyond a narrow band in LEO.
Conventionally, in-space propulsion is so expensive from a mass, volume, and cost perspective that missions are designed to optimize towards a minimum amount of propulsive capability. If any unplanned maneuver occurs, your mission just got a lot shorter. For a communications satellite, that means billions in lost revenue. For a defense satellite, that means you’re a sitting duck for adversaries. For a human spaceflight mission, that means you might not be coming home.
We’re building a propulsion architecture that expands the realm of what’s possible in spaceflight. We’ve crossed several early milestones in the development of a high-efficiency propulsion platform that will lower the barriers to high-energy trajectories, novel orbital regimes, and missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The Genesis system is based around a water-electrolysis architecture that NASA investigated in the 1970s — enabling the efficiency of hydrogen propulsion with the stability of liquid water — which I believe uniquely suits the needs of today’s operators, while preempting the next few decades of space exploration and innovation.
Reducing the barriers to entry for high-energy orbits will unlock incredible revenue opportunities for communications and data operators, expand the envelope of potential science missions, and ensure that the US continues to maintain the ultimate high ground.
We’re lucky to be growing our business at a time when the industry is finally ready to move on from dated, legacy technologies. The talent pool to build better spacecraft systems is at an all-time-high, and customers are more willing than ever to look past “flight heritage” as the primary selection criteria for space hardware. These are the necessary ingredients for a startup to enter and win.
Future visions: nuclear propulsion, in-situ resource utilization, and synthetic fuels
When we started General Galactic in 2023, we set a long-term goal of building a gas station on Mars — because traversing the solar system is ultimately a refueling problem:
To move in space, you require a specific change in velocity (Δv) set by gravity and orbital mechanics to move between orbital trajectories, which is effectively a change in kinetic energy (ΔK)
You can convert chemical energy into the kinetic energy needed for Δv.
You can store more chemical energy per unit mass by selecting or synthesizing materials with higher specific energy. (Second Law of Thermodynamics + Gibbs Free Energy)
The more efficiently you convert that chemical energy for the least amount of mass, the further you go (Tsiolkovsky’s Rocket Equation). The I_sp term (specific impulse) is what General Galactic is aiming to maximize in our architecture.
Carrying more mass than you need severely penalizes your performance, and limits the range of missions a vehicle can accomplish. Imagine if you had to carry all the fuel your car will ever use with you at all times. So, building fueling stations is a necessary step to make big future missions beyond the Moon work.
In the space industry we call the process of taking resources from beyond Earth and aggregating them for these kinds of things in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Aggregating and synthesizing high energy materials for use in spacecraft thrusters allows you to refuel and keep moving.
We spent much of the first year of General Galactic looking to build a market for ISRU-derived tech on Earth, by converting waste carbon dioxide into synthetic fuels and chemicals. We built Sabatier reactors and water electrolyzers, got awarded a patent, and proved to ourselves that carbon dioxide conversion is a terrible business model on Earth (at least in this decade).
However, I believe this concept will one day drive the most valuable industry in the solar system — effectively the galaxy’s energy industry (General Galactic was named for a reason).
Our path forward threads the needle between several things that we see as inevitable:
Near-term: People will do more things in space. They’ll launch more satellites than ever at a bigger scale and a faster rate. They’ll trend towards the mobility solution that offers them the least pain (lowest integration cost, easiest supply chain) at the lowest overall mission cost ($/kg to a target orbit).
Medium-term: Nuclear-powered propulsion will emerge as a viable and scalable method of flying long duration missions and expeditions into the outer solar system and deep space. Water-electrolysis propulsion forms an elegant pair with a fission reactor for nuclear-powered space travel.
Long-term: Gas stations on and around the Moon and Mars will enable continuous round trips throughout the inner solar system, at increasingly reduced costs. The energy penalty (which is effectively analogous to the cost in $) of moving water from the lunar surface to Earth’s orbit is 20X lower than moving it from Earth’s surface to Earth’s orbit.
As we go forward in this journey, I’ll be sharing more details, progress, and learnings. I’ll also add some deep dives into some of the key points made here. Be sure to follow us on socials (X and LinkedIn) to keep up!