ThrustMe |
| ThrustMe |
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| Industry | Aerospace |
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| Founded | 3 February 2017; 7 years ago (2017-02-03) |
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| Founder | Ane Aanesland, Dmytro Rafalskyi |
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| Headquarters | , France |
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Key people | Ane Aanesland (CEO), Dmytro Rafalskyi (CTO) |
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| Products | Spacecraft propulsion |
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Number of employees | 21–50 |
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| Website | https://www.thrustme.fr/ |
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ThrustMe is a deep tech company that designs miniaturized aerospace thrusters for small satellites, increasing the life of satellites and making them more affordable.[1][2]
The company builds gridded ion thrusters (NPT30)[3] and cold gas thrusters (I2T5).[4]
History
ThrustMe was founded in 2017 by Ane Aanesland and Dmytro Rafalskyi, who previously worked at the École Polytechnique and CNRS as researchers in plasma physics and electric propulsion.[5] Initially, the startup was incubated in Agoranov.[6] Also in 2017, ThrustMe raised 1.7 million euros for its development.[7]
In 2018, ThrustMe received €2.4 million from the European Commission to commercialise electric propulsion for nanosatellites.[8]
In 2019, Ane Aanesland received the CNRS innovation medal for her entrepreneurial activities.[9] The same year, SpaceTy and ThrustMe maneuvered for the first time a satellite using iodine as propellant, with a cold-gas thruster.[10]
In 2021, ThrustMe, in partnership with SpaceTy, achieved the first in-orbit demonstration of an electric propulsion system powered by iodine.[3][11][12] The results were published as a research article in the journal Nature, where the maneuvers described resulted in a cumulative altitude change above 3 km.[13][14]
According to the European Space Agency, in regard to the use of iodine rather than Xenon in a gridded ion thruster, "This small but potentially disruptive innovation could help to clear the skies of space junk, by enabling tiny satellites to self-destruct cheaply and easily at the end of their missions, by steering themselves into the atmosphere where they would burn up."[15]
