Cascade Space

The Deep Space Network is oversubscribed and unavailable for commercial space missions. Commercial alternatives are limited, fragmented, and unreliable. Even if they worked well, there are not enough. We are building new, modern infrastructure. Designed to scale. https://cascade.space/

Ever wonder why the Deep Space Network has such massive antennas? Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to use Starlink to communicate with the Moon or Mars? When radio waves leave an antenna, they expand spherically. Imagine you have a balloon that’s 1 foot in diameter. That balloon is your radio signal from low Earth orbit. If your dish is the size of a nickel, that’s all the signal you get to collect. Now blow that balloon up to 690 feet in diameter. A nickel sized area is going to be pretty thin. That’s what you’re getting from the Moon. Now continue blowing up your balloon until it’s 17 miles in diameter. That’s your signal from an asteroid half the distance from the Sun away. You still only get a nickel’s worth of this VERY thin balloon. The only way to get more of the balloon is to have a bigger surface area to collect balloon material with. This is true whether your surface area is a large parabolic reflector or thousands (millions?) of little patch antennas. Received signals from deep space are very low power, on the order of femtowatts. It’s the amount of power a bacteria cell produces when growing and dividing! It is a TINY amount of power. The difference in signal level between low Earth orbit and an asteroid probe 30 million miles away is the difference between hearing a mosquito in the room with you vs hearing one 1 mile away. You are going to need both very big ears and a very very quiet environment to even detect that level of sound. So at this point, you’re probably thinking: just build an amplifier! Well, there’s a problem: noise. See, amplifiers generate noise. This noise primarily comes from electrons randomly wiggling around in every part of the circuit, and there are different ways to minimize it. The tried and true method is cryogenically freezing amplifiers to minimize the amount of wiggling. It’s effective, but it’s not cheap. Cooling something down to 4 degrees above absolute zero is not trivial. Here’s what’s crazy. If you double the noise temperature, you will need double the aperture size in order to receive the same signal! It turns out that controlling noise is an even bigger engineering problem than making large collecting areas. It is also a very large hill to climb for phased array techniques, if they are to be used for the weakest of weak signals. Building antennas for deep space requires both a lot of surface area and extremely low levels of noise. Follow along, as we post more about how we’re going to do this!

The US is in a race to maintain space dominance. Over the past few months we have seen commitment from the administration to establish lunar permanence and win the race with China for the Moon. There's one big glaring problem. The US has plans for: - Artemis lunar missions - Putting nuclear reactors on the Moon for power - Commercial asteroid mining - More, smaller planetary science missions, like the Berkeley Escapade mission - Landing humans on Mars All of these require reliable comms with spacecraft far beyond low Earth orbit. Here's the problem: our only "plan" for communicating with these spacecraft is NASA's Deep Space Network, originally designed for Apollo. There are over 50 active NASA missions competing for time on just 14 large dishes around the globe. It gets worse. In September 2024, NASA's largest 70m dish at Goldstone (DSS-14) over-rotated and damaged itself. It's been offline ever since. No timetable for return to service. Not only is the DSN oversubscribed, it is fragile and wearing out. Just last month, the Berkeley Space Center launched the ESCAPADE mission, which is a new paradigm for public-private partnership, where instead of spending 15 years to design and fly a single multi-billion spacecraft, NASA can lean on private industry to build smaller, cheaper, faster spacecraft in higher volumes. This means that the demand will only continue to grow for science communications. Here's the kicker: the DSN is virtually off-limits for commercial missions, like AstroForge's asteroid mining probes. Only NASA science missions are authorized for allocation, with occasional emergency support provided only in extreme circumstances. We're handicapping our own commercial space industry. The workarounds are embarrassing. There is a patchwork of commercially available large dishes around the world, but no unified network. Equipment and operations are very manual and non-standard. Failures are routine. Missions have been lost. And even if every dish in the world was brought reliably online the capacity still needs to scale by another order of magnitude to keep up with US ambitions for space. Earlier this year we started Cascade to fix this. Our initial plan when we got into Y Combinator was to repurpose underutilized radio telescopes. Fast, clever, but after talking to customers: not remotely good enough. The US needs NEW infrastructure. Built in America. For American space leadership. Next week we are revealing our plans. If you care about US space dominance beyond LEO you need to see this. Stay tuned. #SpaceTech #DeepSpace #SpaceInfrastructure #NationalSecurity #SpacePolicy

We are hiring a senior full stack software engineer, with an emphasis on front end / user interface design. If you are looking for some of the most interesting work of your career, having all the ownership, and building a software engineering team please reach out! https://lnkd.in/gmM8F6xt

We are very excited to welcome Wael Farah, Ph.D. to Cascade Space! Wael joins us from the SETI Institute, where he brought up the Allen Telescope Array and turned into a highly productive scientific instrument. Here at Cascade we are building the next generation of large aperture ground stations for lunar and deep space communications. Wael is a key hire in building the team that will make this future a reality! 🚀 📡

We are excited to announce that we have closed our $5.9M seed round! The round included participation from Nova Threshold, Undeterred Capital, Y Combinator, Night Capital, Olive Capital, Valkyrie Ventures, Karman Ventures, Palm Drive Capital, Garage Capital, TRAC.vc, Aurelia Foundry, Hawktail, MGV.VC, Pioneer Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures, and others. This funding gives us the opportunity to hire a small team, build software that accelerates RF and communication system design, and make progress toward our vision of having a network of large aperture ground stations. We have been hard at work since the YC X25 batch ended and have some exciting new stuff to share in the coming weeks! https://lnkd.in/gtj6_6Hy

Today is Demo Day. Come find our cofounders Jacob Portukalian and Arlen Abraham once we're done with our pitch, we are looking forward to all the conversations today. Three months ago to the day we received our confirmation that Cascade Space (formerly Heliosphere Network) had been incorporated. In the past 90 days we got into Y Combinator, built link budget software, hired our first employee Brett Gottula, downloaded an image from 58 million miles away, and signed 4 LOIs. This team is crushing it, but we know that what we've earned is the right to go out and actually build the thing that people need and want. Demo Day is not the end, it's the very beginning.

We are working hard on integrating our first site into the network, and in the bringup process pointed the antenna at STEREO-A, 58 million miles away (20x further than the moon!), and downloaded this image of the sun. Looking forward to seeing what other fun we can have with this one!

This dish is AI generated, but some very real dishes will be live in our network this year! Follow us to stay updated as we roll out new capacity and features.