An aerospace technology startup based in Washington, D.C., landed a NASA research grant and expects "rapid" hiring at a new Santa Fe office, its CEO recently told New Mexico Inno.
Rhea Space Activity, founded in the U.S. capital city in 2018, announced Wednesday morning it received a $750,000 grant as part of NASA's Flight Opportunities program for its flagship celestial navigation technology.
That navigation tech is called the Jervis Autonomy Module, or JAM, a combined hardware and software device that provides autonomous guidance and navigation using images of celestial objects, like the moon, planets or other satellites. That's different than traditional space navigation, which typically relies on communication between other satellites or systems on earth, like NASA's Deep Space Network.
The Deep Space Network, or DSN, is an array of super-powerful antennas that are "currently operating at capacity and are oversubscribed," per a recent NASA Office of the Inspector General audit, making the network costly for aerospace companies to use. Rhea Space Activity (RSA) thinks its JAM device can help "democratize" access to deep space for more of those types of companies, its CEO Shawn Usman said in a statement.
The $750,000 NASA grant will fund a contract between Rhea and ispace technologies U.S. Inc., a Denver-based subsidiary of ispace Inc., a lunar exploration company headquartered in Tokyo. That contract will see two JAM devices tested aboard a pair of lunar communications satellites operated by ispace during an upcoming Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission by Draper Laboratory, funded under a $73 million NASA award.
The mission is expected to launch in 2026. It'd be RSA's first "manifested lunar mission," Usman told New Mexico Inno.
JAM — which Usman said traces its technological roots back to the early 2000s through NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory — isn't Rhea's only product. The startup also has a quantum-encrypted laser communications technology called the Quantum Lovelace Optical Augmentation Kit, or QLOAK.
While RSA is headquartered in Washington, D.C., the startup in early 2023 opened a second office location in Edinburgh, Scotland, for a subsidiary operation. That U.K. office "grew rapidly," Usman said, because of "significant" demand for Rhea's quantum technology.
Off the heels of the Edinburgh office's opening and growth, RSA, in October 2023, unveiled an office in Santa Fe, its second U.S. location. Usman said the startup wants to build out its quantum engineering team in The City Different because of the "rich particle physics background" in New Mexico.
"It's where the Manhattan Project was staged, and of course lots of that type of intellectual prowess when it comes to nuclear physics and particle physics still exists at Los Alamos [National Laboratory] and all the other laboratories in the Albuquerque region," Usman said. "So, we're definitely looking to leverage that talent pool in our growth strategy for the Santa Fe office."
RSA currently has one employee in Santa Fe but could have 10 to 15 people working out of its Santa Fe office by the end of 2024, a combination of employees living in New Mexico full time and employees traveling between the office and other sites, Usman said. The company has one position for a missile system guidance, navigation and control engineer position in Santa Fe listed on its website, with a salary range of $125,000 to $225,000.
Rhea employs 17 people currently, including three in the U.K. Usman sees more collaboration between the Edinburgh and Santa Fe offices in the year ahead because of the two regions' — New Mexico and Scotland — expertise in quantum and nuclear physics. Those two areas, he added, are important to building out RSA's QLOAK quantum laser communications product.
"Our Santa Fe employees all should expect to spend a lot of time in the U.K., as well," Usman said. "It's being able to create that international partnership that will allow us to build a really game-changing quantum-encrypted technology that's needed to secure laser communications in the future."
Usman said he visited Albuquerque frequently — once per month or once per quarter — while working in the U.S. intelligence community prior to launching RSA. He continued traveling to New Mexico with Rhea because many of the startup's military customers, he said, are based out of Kirtland Air Force Base, including the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force.
Preparing for the 2026 lunar mission will be a big focus for Rhea in 2024, Usman said. So too will be furthering the startup's quantum engineering capabilities to advance the development of QLOAK — where he said Santa Fe and New Mexico more broadly could play a big part.
RSA is actively fundraising, Usman said; the startup's existing lead investor is based in Santa Fe, he added. Rhea won last year's Ski Lift Pitch, an annual pitch competition held at Taos Ski Valley; Albuquerque-based Hoonify Technologies Inc. was this year's Ski Lift Pitch winner.
