Space Ocean Corp is an emerging pre-revenue space logistics startup headquartered in Brownsville, Texas. Founded in 2021, the company is developing what amounts to the “gas station in space” infrastructure—providing critical on-orbit refueling and resource transfer services that enable satellites to operate longer, travel farther, and reduce launch costs.
“And if you could get refueled out there in those far away locations, which are several years away, or maybe in the future, only several months away, well, that’ll extend that billion dollar satellite and enable more capability.”
Paul Mamakos, Space Ocean
The company has engineered the ALV-N (Autonomous Logistics Vehicle - Next generation) as a multipurpose orbital platform capable of servicing customer satellites through proximity operations and resource delivery. The ALV-N serves as both a technology demonstrator and a planned commercial service platform.
On this edition of The Journal of Space Commerce Podcast, Tom Patton talks with Paul Mamakos, CEO of Space Ocean. He said refueling spacecraft is essential, particularly for deep space missions.
“If somebody sends a billion dollar satellite out toward the deeper space, deeper solar system, Mars, Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter, it’s going to take a while to get there. And they usually expend a large amount of their fuel just to get out there, maybe 80 to 90% of their mass, spacecraft mass, just in fuel to get out there. So when they get out there, they’ve run out of most of their capability for maneuvering. So not only maneuvering in low Earth orbit or the GEO area or the MEO cislunar area, but also in the deeper solar system,” Mamakos said.
“And if you could get refueled out there in those far away locations, which are several years away, or maybe in the future, only several months away, well, that’ll extend that billion dollar satellite and enable more capability. So we’re looking to source fluid from off Earth. Initially, we’ll get our fluid or water from Earth. You know, it could be other things like liquid nitrogen or oxygen. And then also we could source it from off-Earth and deliver off-Earth.”
Along with in-space refueling, the Space Ocean business model includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS), and resources for space laboratories and pharmaceutical R&D.
