Hubble Network has become the first company in history to establish a direct-to-satellite Bluetooth connection – a major technology validation for the company, opening the door to potentially connecting millions more devices anywhere in the world.
The Seattle-based startup launched its first two satellites into orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 ride-share mission in March. Since then, the company has confirmed that it has received signals from the onboard 3.5mm Bluetooth chips from over 600 kilometers away.
Sky is truly the limit for space-enabled Bluetooth devices: the startup says its technology could be used in markets including logistics, livestock tracking, smart collars for pets, GPS watches for kids, Includes car inventory, construction sites, and soil temperature monitoring. Haro said the low-hanging fruit are industries desperate for even once-daily network coverage, such as remote asset monitoring for the oil and gas industry. As the constellation scales, Hubble will turn its attention to areas that may need more frequent updates, such as soil monitoring, continuous coverage use cases such as fall monitoring for the elderly.
Once it’s up and running, a user will need to integrate their device’s chipset with a piece of firmware to enable a connection to Hubble’s network.
Hubble was founded in 2021 by Life360 co-founder Alex Haro, Iotera founder Ben Wild (who sold his startup to Ring), and aerospace engineer John Kim. Haro said that the first time Wilde presented the idea of connecting a Bluetooth chip to a satellite, his initial reaction was, “No weird way.” And that sounds crazy, especially since consumer electronics can struggle to connect to other Bluetooth-enabled devices that are only a few feet away.
But the demand is there: the company says that current IoT devices are power-hungry, expensive to operate, and lack global connectivity. These are the primary limitations with Bluetooth-enabled devices today, and they prevent many industries from leveraging IoT for their businesses.
The company joined Y Combinator’s winter 2022 cohort and closed a $20 million Series A last March. Hubble’s first innovation was to develop software to enable off-the-shelf Bluetooth chips to communicate over long ranges with low power.
On the space side, the company also patented a phased array antenna that could launch on a small satellite. The antennas act almost like a magnifying glass, and that’s what enables an off-the-shelf Bluetooth chip to communicate with a Hubble satellite. The team also had to solve problems related to Doppler, the frequency mismatch between high-speed objects exchanging data via radio waves.
One of Hubble’s satellites in the ground test chamber.
Hubble plans to launch a third satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 mission and a fourth on Transporter-13 this summer. They said they would build four satellites in what Haro called a “beta constellation,” and pilot customers are still starting to turn on their integrations today. The startup plans to launch the following 32 satellites simultaneously in the fourth quarter of 2025 or early 2026, although a launch provider has not yet been selected.
They will form Hubble’s first “production constellation” of 36 satellites, and they will communicate with Hubble satellites for about 2-3 hours per day from anywhere in the world.
Credit : techcrunch.com
