""If you're designing a space mission and trying to get a capability to space, you're constrained by two things," co-founder and President Joe Landon said in a recent interview. "One, you have to build something that can either fit or fold into a rocket, and you also have to constrain yourself by what satellite bus you're going to go on. We saw that increasingly, missions need more scale and more size ... larger antennas, higher power, and with higher power, the need for larger radiators.""
""Instead of astronauts and robotic arms, Rendezvous is betting on autonomous swarm assembly and electromagnetism. The company is commercializing a technology called "tesserae," flat-packed modular tiles that can launch in dense stacks and magnetically latch to form structures on obit. With a software command, the tiles are designed to unlatch and rearrange themselves when the mission changes.""
""They find each other, they communicate... they arrange themselves, come together using magnetic docking and then latch together," Landon said. "If you want to change that arrangement or replace something or upgrade, you can just send a command ... unlatch, move over here, go into storage or come out of storage and we can change the arrangement.""
Rocket fairings constrain spacecraft size because hardware must fit or fold to launch, forcing complex, costly assembly via many launches. The International Space Station required dozens of launches and over $100 billion and cannot be altered after assembly. Rendezvous Robotics develops flat-packed modular tiles called tesserae that stack densely for launch, then autonomously find each other, magnetically dock, and form larger structures in orbit. Each tile contains a processor and magnetic docking hardware and can unlatch and rearrange by software commands to upgrade or reconfigure a structure. The approach aims to scale to larger diameters, reduce launch frequency, and enable flexible, upgradable space infrastructure.
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