A Houston company called Orbital Arc believes it has found an unlikely solution to one of the space industry's most stubborn challenges: making satellite thrusters lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. The answer, according to founder Jonathan Huffman, involves naphthalene—the same compound found in mothballs.
Orbital Arc emerged from the Techstars Industries of the Future Accelerator in 2024, pitching what it describes as patent-pending ionization technology for its Gas-Phase Field Effect Electric Propulsion thruster. The technology, Huffman contends, ionizes propellant four times as efficiently as the Hall Effect and gridded ion thrusters that dominate the market today. If the claims hold up, the company's engine could deliver thrust comparable to major NASA interplanetary missions while fitting inside cubesat-scale hardware.
That's a significant promise in an industry where every gram counts and propellant costs can spiral. But Orbital Arc's path from prototype to product remains uncertain, particularly when it comes to financing.
A Funding Picture That Refuses to Come Into Focus
The company's financial trajectory is difficult to pin down. A listing on Pitch.vc from spring 2026 showed an $8 million pre-seed target, though Orbital Arc has not publicly confirmed raising such a round. No Form D filing surfaces in SEC records. CB Insights notes a $120,000 seed/accelerator investment from Techstars in March 2024. At the accelerator's demo day three months later, Huffman told attendees he had raised 30 percent of a round during the program, according to local outlet Teknovation.biz, though he declined to specify the total amount sought.
By November 2024, the company's own blog post revealed a shift in strategy. Orbital Arc had initially aimed to raise "about a $500k pre-seed," the post explained, but pivoted toward pursuing grants and Department of Defense contracts while building a technology-readiness-level-4 prototype. The company declined to discuss financing details when contacted more recently.
For a startup in capital-intensive hardware development, the ambiguity is notable. Then again, Huffman seems more focused on the engineering than the pitch deck.
Mothballs Meet Microgravity
Orbital Arc's engine relies on solid naphthalene that sublimates into gas. The company projects 2,650 seconds of specific impulse at 68 millinewtons per kilowatt, with a combined thruster and power-processing-unit mass under 600 grams for a 2-kilowatt system, according to its website. To translate that into plain English: the thruster delivers strong performance while weighing about as much as a large smartphone.
"We can go from a thruster that's about a few inches across and several kilograms to a thruster on a chip that's about an inch across and has the same thrust output, but weighs about an eighth as much," Huffman explained to IEEE Spectrum. The magazine reported the approach claims a 30 to 40 percent power-efficiency improvement over conventional ion thrusters. Perhaps more compelling for cost-conscious satellite operators, naphthalene fuel costs less than one-thousandth the price of xenon, the industry standard.
A U.S. patent application filed in February 2024 and published seven months later describes the technical mechanism behind these claims: "soft ionization" via nanotips, such as carbon nanotubes, with immediate ion acceleration that eliminates the need for a containment chamber. Whether the concept scales from laboratory bench to orbit is the question Orbital Arc must now answer.
Advisors With Pedigree, Prototype in Progress
The company has assembled a roster of advisors with deep industry credentials. Natalya Bailey, who co-founded electrospray-thruster company Accion Systems and now works as an investment partner at XFactor Ventures, serves as scientific advisor. Mike Patterson, who spent 37 years in electric propulsion at NASA Glenn Research Center and led the NSTAR and NEXT programs, provides technical guidance through his consultancy, Desert Works Propulsion.
Industry advisors include Sam Peterson, a founding partner at Cislunar International and former director of spacecraft operations at Firefly, along with Terry Trevino of Magneto Space. Huffman himself holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina and worked at CREO Inc. before launching Orbital Arc in 2023. LinkedIn indicates the company employs between two and 10 people.
Prototype fabrication took place at Oak Ridge National Laboratory cleanrooms, IEEE Spectrum reported. A July post on LinkedIn noted the company had "advanced to the prototype stage," though details about testing milestones remain sparse.
A Crowded Field With Deep Pockets
Orbital Arc is hardly alone in chasing next-generation propulsion. Electric-propulsion startups have attracted substantial early-stage capital in recent years, driven by surging demand for satellite constellations and deep-space missions.
Magdrive, a U.K.-based developer of electric thrusters, raised $10.5 million in seed funding led by Redalpine in early 2025, with participation from Founders Fund, Balerion, Alumni Ventures, Outsized Ventures, 7percent, and Entrepreneur First, TechCrunch reported. Juno Propulsion, a U.S. company building detonation-cycle electric propulsion, announced a $1.4 million pre-seed round led by SOSV in mid-2026.
France's ION-X closed a €13 million round to industrialize ionic-liquid electrospray technology in December 2024. Morpheus Space secured $15 million in strategic investment from Alpine Space Ventures and the European Investment Fund in early 2026. Japan's Pale Blue raised approximately ¥1.5 billion—roughly $10 million—in Series C funding in 2025 for water-based Hall-effect thrusters.
The Seraphim Space Index showed robust SpaceTech investment in early 2026, with propulsion hardware drawing increased strategic participation across the infrastructure category. Investors appear willing to bet on technologies that promise to reduce satellite operating costs and extend mission lifespans.
The Two-Year Bet
When asked about commercialization timelines, Huffman offered a measured forecast. "Two years from now, I can have a product that is sellable, probably," he told IEEE Spectrum. The hedge in that sentence—"probably"—feels appropriate for a company still building prototypes and working through the labyrinth of Department of Defense contract processes.
The company's November 2024 blog mentioned it had built a corporate information-security program sufficient to pursue DoD contracts, a prerequisite for accessing the military's sprawling satellite-procurement apparatus. Whether that pathway will prove more fruitful than venture capital remains to be seen.
For now, Orbital Arc represents the kind of technical gamble that defines early-stage space hardware: a bold claim about performance gains, a founder willing to forgo traditional fundraising, and a technology that could either reshape an industry or quietly fade into the archives of promising ideas that never quite scaled. The naphthalene, at least, is cheap.
