NASA Awards Contract for Solar Sail Propulsion System
Opterus to Receive $10.2 Million for Structural Deployment System Development
NASA has awarded a $10.2 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase III contract to Opterus to provide the structural deployment system for the agency’s next solar sail spacecraft. Opterus is developing a system to deploy and control a 1,600-square-meter sail, roughly the size of a hockey rink, using four 30-meter (≈100-foot) composite booms and integrated mechanisms. Delivery to NASA is planned for early 2028.
“It’s an SBIR success story. Two phases took our technology from research to validated hardware.”
Kiel Davis, Opterus.
The award advances Opterus’ Trussed Collapsible Tubular Mast (TCTM) technology, a lightweight composite boom architecture proven through earlier SBIR awards. The booms are designed to remain stiff and thermally stable after being tightly coiled for launch, then autonomously spool out in an X-shaped configuration to support the sail.
“It’s an SBIR success story,” said Kiel Davis, president of Opterus. “Two phases took our technology from research to validated hardware, and now our boom architecture is enabling a new scale of solar sailing. The systems engineering behind this effort is strengthening everything we do, from antennas to sensor arrays to lunar infrastructure.”
Opterus is engineering a tightly integrated system that controls sail shape and structural response to maintain stable radiation pressure and consistent propulsion performance throughout the mission.
“Building large precision space systems like this is exactly the type of challenge Opterus was created to solve,” said Tom Murphey, Founder and CTO of Opterus. “It’s more than deploying booms. We’re controlling the sail’s shape, its flatness, and propulsion characteristics.”
NASA’s most recent solar sail, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3), deployed an 80 square meter sail on 7-meter booms. The spacecraft Opterus is supporting will fly a sail with an area 20 times that of ACS3.
Design, fabrication, and testing of the solar sail deployment system are currently underway at Opterus’ Loveland, Colorado, facility. Applied Aerospace & Defense is supplying the spacecraft’s sail membrane, made from a proprietary advanced thin-polymer, with flight heritage from previous solar and drag sail systems. Both companies are preparing for integrated system testing before delivering the system to NASA.