Beyond Reach Labs
ActiveSpace solar arrays that grow to the size of a football field in orbit
About
At Beyond Reach Labs we are building solar panels for Space that grow from the size of a dining table to a football field in orbit. Mitch and Pele met 13 years ago as freshmen at UPenn studying mechanical engineering. Mitch recently got his PhD at Carnegie Mellon working with NASA on kilometer-scale deployable structures, and Pele spent seven years at SpaceX leading Dragon parachute engineering, safely returning astronauts from space. The collective satellites today use around 20MW, roughly the output of a datacenter on earth, but by 2030 there is a demand for over 10GW, a 500x increase, largely driven by orbital datacenters, space stations, and lunar outposts. If you want more power, your only option is to launch larger solar panels, which quickly become fragile or impractically expensive. As a result, power constraints already determine whether missions or industries can exist at all. But at Beyond Reach Labs we have introduced a new class of deployable solar panels giving satellites 10x more usable power without increasing launch mass or volume. This works because our patented deployable design changes geometry in space, allowing for us to reach 10x longer while remaining rigid.
Founders
Mitchell Fogelson· Founder | CEOHey, my name is Mitch Fogelson. I earned my PhD at CMU, working with NASA on the design, simulation, and optimization of kilometer-scale deployable space structures. I have published in the top robotics and aerospace conferences and journals, and recieved the Editor Choice Best Paper Award from ASME JMD 2023. Beyond Reach Labs is building space megastructures to be deployed from a single rocket launch, accelerating new space capabilities.
- Pele Collins· Founder | CTO
I have been working on some of the hardest technical challenges for almost a decade. I spent 6 years as SpaceX leading the engineering and production teams for the parachutes and between that also worked as the Plasma-Facing-Components Technical team lead at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Now as co-founder of Beyond Reach Labs, we are currently working to enable space megastructures to be deployed from a single rocket launch and to accelerate the design of deployable space systems.
Product launches · 1 launch
The future in Space is unfolding