For decades, rocket fairing has constrained engineers who design space structures. Only hardware that can be folded to fit inside can go to orbit.
This results in intensive and expensive assembly time within the space. The International Space Station, the largest single object in which humanity is embedded in space, has been assembled for dozens of launches and costs over $100 billion. And of course, once the structure is assembled, there is no way to change or change the structure.
Rendezvous Robotics wants to change that.
“If you’re planning a space mission and trying to gain space capabilities, you’re constrained by two things,” co-founder President Joe Landon said in a recent interview. “One thing we need to build something that can fit or fold onto a rocket, and we also need to constrain ourselves by which satellite bus we go. More and more, we found that missions need more scale and size.
Instead of astronauts and robotic arms, rendezvous bets on autonomous groupings and electromagnetics. The company commercializes a technology known as “tesserae.” This is a flat pack modular tile that can be fired with a dense stack and magnetically latch to form a structure with OBIT. With software commands, tiles are designed to latch and rearrange themselves when missions change.
“They find each other and communicate… They arrange themselves, they come together using magnetic docking, then latch together,” Landon said. “If you want to change that arrangement, replace or upgrade something, just send a command. You can unsubscribe, move here, move to storage, or leave storage and change the arrangement.”
The current tiles are the size of dinner plates, about an inch thick, but the team expects to scale the tiles to the diameter of the rocket fairing. Each tile has its own processor, various sensors and batteries. These are “very simple” devices designed for low-cost, bulk manufacturing, said Phil Frank, CEO and co-founder of Rendezvous.
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The technology was invented by Ariel Ekblaw around the time of MIT and incubated at the Aurelia Institute, founded by the nonprofit Ekblaw. She worked with Telecom veteran Frank and longtime space executive Landon to spin the technology from Aurelia and bring it to the commercial market.
The company is formalised around Thanksgiving in 2024, and the team, as Frank puts it, is busy “evangelizing solutions and technology.”
Landon, who began his career as an engineer in Boeing’s commercial satellite business and later led R&D at Lockheed Martin Space, said the company is headquartered just outside of Denver.
Rendezvous closed the $3 million pre-seed led by Aurelia Foundry and 8090 Industries, using ATX Venture Partners, Mana Ventures and Angel Investors. The round will help hire more employees and move the technology from on-track demonstrations to full-scale products.
The company is initially targeting missions that “physical scale, physical size, drive performance,” Landon said. On the commercial side, the focus is on communication missions that require large antenna apertures to communicate with small antennas on the ground, such as mobile phones and cars. In the case of national security, remote sensing is the benefit of a highly sensitive detection system.
The tile prototype is already flying on two missions on the Blue Origin’s new Shepherd and on the International Space Station. The ISS demonstration demonstrated autonomous docking, self-correcting, and reconfiguration capabilities.
Looking ahead, the company aims to demonstrate on the ISS in early 2026 and run missions outside the ISS in late 2026 or early 2027. After that, “a true mission that shows mission utility” follows, Landon builds an antenna aperture in space.
“We’re not building anything specific,” he said. “We offer new ways to build. It’s the ‘way’ you build, not what you build. ”
