The altitude between 200 and 300 kilometers above Earth is, in aerospace parlance, hostile territory. Atmospheric drag claws at anything that ventures there, pulling spacecraft inexorably downward. It's why most commercial satellite operators give the zone a wide berth, preferring the relative safety of orbits farther out.
But Reading-based NewOrbit Space sees opportunity where others see friction. The UK startup just raised an oversubscribed $18.5 million Series A—announced June 8, 2026—to build what it claims will be Europe's first dedicated manufacturing facility for satellites designed to thrive in this unforgiving region called Very Low Earth Orbit, or VLEO.
Voyager Ventures led the round, which also drew backing from an eclectic group: David B. Kirk, former Chief Scientist at NVIDIA; Lawrence Leuschner, who co-founded and ran micro-mobility company TIER Mobility; and the Illusian founder office, linked to alumni from Supercell, Zalando, and Wolt. Returning investors Atlantic.vc, Lifeline Ventures, and LGF joined as well, alongside family office Custos.
The funding arrives roughly five months after Voyager closed its $275 million Fund II on January 28, 2026, bringing the firm's assets under management to $475 million. The venture outfit focuses on what it calls foundational industries—energy, materials, mobility infrastructure. Space, apparently, fits the bill.
Breathing Thin Air
NewOrbit's pitch hinges on proximity. Drop a satellite to half the altitude of a conventional low Earth orbit constellation, the thinking goes, and you can capture imagery with drone-like resolution while beaming telecommunications signals with less power. The company claims costs 20 times lower than traditional satellite imaging, though those economics haven't been independently validated in the wild.
The technical hurdle is staying aloft. At 200 to 300 kilometers, atmospheric molecules are sparse but relentless, dragging on anything with mass. NewOrbit's answer is a propulsion system it calls AURA—an air-breathing ion thruster that ingests those very atmospheric particles as propellant. Feed in oxygen, nitrogen, whatever's floating by. Ionize it. Expel it. Stay up.
In February 2026, the company ran AURA through a 200-hour endurance test: 150 hours on atmospheric gases, 50 on xenon. At a conference in June 2024, NewOrbit's team reported specific impulse figures north of 8,500 seconds and thrust between 1 and 15 millinewtons under lab conditions. Simulations, they noted, suggest the architecture could generate more thrust than drag in certain ultra-low scenarios—though real-world orbital operations have yet to prove that out.
The company pairs the propulsion tech with aerodynamic design and materials engineered to resist atomic oxygen, which corrodes surfaces at these altitudes. Whether it all works for extended commercial missions remains an open question.
Building the Factory
Series A capital will finance what NewOrbit calls the NEO Production Complex, a manufacturing facility slated to open in 2027. The company plans to integrate its first commercial satellite—carrying customer payloads—for a 2028 launch, then ramp from 10 units a year to "several a week" at full throttle. That would make it Europe's largest dedicated VLEO operation, assuming the market materializes.
NewOrbit hasn't named its launch provider. It hasn't disclosed customer commitments or specific payload contracts for the 2028 mission, either. The production timeline is ambitious, perhaps more so than the founders expected when they started the company in 2021.
Co-founders CEO Anatolii Papulov and CTO Ruslan Rakhimov previously raised a $7.5 million seed round in April 2024, led by Yes VC.
Stacking the Advisory Board
Alongside the funding news, NewOrbit announced that Jean-Jacques Dordain—former Director General of the European Space Agency—has joined its advisory board. It's a notable get. Dordain oversaw ESA during its expansion years, and his name carries weight in European aerospace circles.
The appointment follows a string of others earlier this year: JPL Fellow Dr. Dan M. Goebel in April, former ESA Head of Mission Operations Dr. Paolo Ferri in April, and Dr. Mark Drinkwater, who ran ESA's Earth and Mission Science Division until 2025, in March. The roster reads like a who's-who of orbital mechanics and Earth observation veterans—an insurance policy of sorts, signaling credibility to potential customers and regulators.
Institutional Validation, Sort Of
Germany's Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation—known by its German acronym SPRIND—awarded NewOrbit a contract in February to assess the breakthrough potential of sustained VLEO operations. It's validation, though the "disruptive innovation" framing suggests the agency is exploring unproven territory as much as endorsing a sure bet.
The European Space Agency granted the company a €175,000 contract back in April 2024 to test thruster-cathode coupling for air-breathing systems. Modest figures, but they establish a technical relationship with the continent's primary space authority.
A Crowding Frontier?
NewOrbit isn't alone in eyeing VLEO. France's Univity raised a €27 million Series A in April 2026 to build direct-to-device connectivity demonstrators at very low altitudes. Spain's Kreios Space closed an €8 million seed round in September 2025, backed in part by the NATO Innovation Fund, to develop air-breathing propulsion and VLEO platforms.
The European Defence Agency announced a consortium led by SENER in March to design Europe's first defense-oriented VLEO satellite concept. The interest is institutional and commercial, European and military. Whether that adds up to a sustainable market—or just a flurry of early-stage bets—remains unclear.
Historical precedents offer mixed signals. ESA's GOCE satellite demonstrated drag-free control near 250 to 270 kilometers using ion propulsion from 2009 to 2013, proving the physics work for science missions. Japan's SLATS mission tested altitudes as low as 167 kilometers before re-entering in 2019. Both were government-funded, limited-duration experiments. Scaling to commercial operations with weekly production cadences is a different proposition entirely.
The Sustainability Angle
NewOrbit frames the 200-to-300-kilometer band as self-cleaning. Objects at that altitude naturally re-enter within weeks, pulled down by drag—positioning VLEO as a lower-debris alternative to the congested orbits above, where defunct satellites can linger for decades.
It's a compelling pitch at a time when orbital debris concerns are rising. But sustainability arguments only matter if the business model holds. Can NewOrbit secure enough customers willing to bet on an altitude regime that's largely unproven for long-duration commercial missions? Can it deliver the cost savings it projects? And can it keep satellites operational long enough to justify the infrastructure investment?
The factory in 2027, the first commercial launch in 2028—those are the milestones that will start to answer those questions. Until then, NewOrbit is selling a vision of Earth's "last empty orbit," a phrase that's equal parts marketing and manifesto. Whether it's prophetic or premature, we'll know soon enough.
