TransAstra

Based in California, TransAstra specializes in developing solutions related to orbital logistics and space resources. Company Founder Dr Joel Sercel is a CalTech space propulsion technologist and a plasma physicist, former NASA/JPL engineer, and former CTO of Momentus. The company builds and flies space tugs, providing customer satellites point-to-point orbital transport for the purpose of asteroid mining and moving heavy industry to outer space.

The company’s Worker Bee family of space tugs, which was in development as of 2024, provides in-space logistical services such as satellite transportation, station-keeping, replenishment, debris clearance, and payload hosting in both Earth orbit and cislunar space.

Key customers and partnerships

In April 2022, TransAstra partnered with ReOrbit to provide engineering analysis for its Worker Bee orbital transfer vehicles to deliver ReOrbit’s customer satellites to low Earth, medium Earth, geostationary, and cis-lunar orbits. The company partnered with Celestron in September 2022, to jointly develop powerful and economical ground- and space-based telescope systems for global commercial and government customers. In December 2022, the company received funding via two federal Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) programs to develop Mini Bee Capture Bag (MBCB) under phase 1 of NASA’s SBIR Ignite program, as well as modify its Sutter Technology, a proprietary Optimized Matched Filter Tracking technology used for space domain awareness.

Further, in May 2023, TransAstra was awarded a Phase One SBIR contract by the US Space Force to explore new applications for its proprietary, propellant-agnostic Omnivore thruster for government and commercial customers.