TAMPA, Fla. — Former SpaceX engineers who were instrumental in building and scaling Starlink have emerged from stealth with a new startup aimed at shattering the monopolies governing global orbital connectivity. Named Eclipse Space, the Redmond, Washington based venture officially debuted on June 26.
Backed by capital from early stage aerospace heavyweights like Space Capital, Tectonic, and Ubiquity, Eclipse plans to deliver its first customer hardware prototypes later this year ahead of an integrated demonstration satellite launch slated for 2027.
Decentralizing the Skies
Unlike SpaceX’s highly vertical integration, where everything from component manufacturing to launch vehicles is kept strictly in-house; Eclipse is executing a decentralized, fabless manufacturing model closely mirrored after Apple’s relationship with the iPhone.
Eclipse designs the high throughput satellite architecture, retains full ownership of the intellectual property, and programs the operational software stack. However, it outsources the actual physical fabrication to a global network of regional assembly partners across North America, Europe, and Asia. This structure allows mid-sized nations and large commercial enterprises to deploy custom, top-tier satellite constellations without first having to invest billions to build a SpaceX-scale manufacturing apparatus.
“Space has become critical national infrastructure, as essential as a power grid or a telecom network…Countries don’t rent their power grids. But most of the world is on track to never own its space infrastructure, because until now the only options were renting from a foreign operator or paying more than many nations could justify to build it alone.”
– Derek Huerta, CEO and Co-Founder of Eclipse Space (previously Satellite Payload Engineering Manager at SpaceX)
The Starlink Playbook Applied Elsewhere
Eclipse enters the market with arguably the most experienced mass-production engineering roster outside of SpaceX itself. Out of its initial 30 person workforce, roughly half are Starlink veterans; including 13 engineers who helped pioneer SpaceX’s internal “Satellite Development” division during the constellation’s earliest design phases.
Subsystem Specialization Matrix
| Eclipse Engineering Team | Proven Scale Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Phased Array & RF Engineers | Built the original Starlink phased antennas; scaling production from prototypes to dozens of units per week. |
| Power & Hardware Systems | Designed high-density satellite power grids and modems optimized for rapid orbital deployment. |
| AI Software Integration | Rapid-prototyping automated design cycles using embedded software logic. |
While SpaceX successfully demonstrated that low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites can be mass-produced at previously impossible cost-efficiencies, a troubling geopolitical bottleneck has emerged; without an independent alternative, smaller sovereign nations looking to build out secure data networks have been forced to choose between renting access from a handful of Western corporate giants or turning to state-backed networks in China.
Initial Architecture and the 2027 Demonstrator
To streamline its design pipelines, Eclipse has completely absorbed the engineering team behind Agent Studio, an AI-driven development tool licensed from technology firm Rendered.ai. The team is utilizing this embedded AI to aggressively run automated simulation loops across its structural and radio-frequency design processes.
Eclipse is currently working on a sub-100 kilogram technology demonstration satellite to validate its baseline core systems in 2027.