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. cascade.space

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!

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.

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? 👇

At Cascade we are building the lowest noise amplifiers in history. The future depends on it.

Enter Indium Phosphide HEMTs. These bad boys can hit unprecedented levels of noise, while physically at room temperature. They come close enough to cryo at such a low price point that they make it possible to build a DSN caliber receiver without the freezer.

Deep space comms has one real enemy: noise. From LEO to an asteroid probe 30 million miles away the signal drops by 250 dB... it's the difference between hearing a mosquito in the room and hearing one a mile away.

No one actually likes cheap branded pens so we made swag that people will actually use. New logo drops next week!

A very important reason to build deep space infrastructure

The state of ground stations for deep space is so bad that investing an eye watering $4B into space-based networks for just cislunar space alone is actually happening. That's right, $4B just for the Moon. Still won't work for Mars or asteroids.