Orbion Space Technology

Orbion Space Technology designs and manufactures Hall-effect electric propulsion for small satellites from its base at 101 W Lakeshore Drive in Houghton, Michigan. The company has more than forty full-time engineers, including seven with PhDs in electric space propulsion, and says its core team has over 200 years of combined experience with Hall-effect thruster technology and has built hardware that has flown across the solar system, on missions including Dawn to Vesta and Ceres and Rosetta to comet 67P. Orbion is authorised as a sole-source supplier for U.S. government agencies and its quality system is certified to AS9100D for the design, manufacture, qualification, sale and support of satellite propulsion systems.

Aurora propulsion system

• A fully integrated system with a magnetically shielded Hall-effect thruster, power processing unit, propellant management assembly, harness and storage tank
• Continuously throttleable from 100 to 300 W, with thrust-to-power above 60 mN/kW and 1,400 seconds of specific impulse
• Patent-pending ZeroTorque design with zero magnetic moment, so no perturbing magnetic torque in low Earth orbit
• Dual-mode operation that can raise thrust 100 times on demand for agile collision avoidance, and a simple interface of 28 V unregulated power and RS-422 data with fire-and-forget commanding or detailed telemetry
• Radiation-hardened options with QML/QPL components above 100 krad total ionising dose for MEO, GEO and xGEO missions
• Runs on xenon, with published mission trades for krypton and argon and peer-reviewed IEPC papers on krypton life qualification

Manufacturing and services

Aurora is built on automated production lines with robots and automated test facilities, from one or two units per run to 1,000, and every unit is assembled, inspected and acceptance tested in-house, including in-vacuum performance testing across the full throttle range. Services include mechanical and thermal interface design, integration of propulsion onto customer spacecraft panels, manoeuvre planning, trajectory analysis, fuelling strategy and launch and early-operations support. The leadership team includes CEO Brad King, who holds a PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan, Jason Sommerville, Rob Washeleski, formerly of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Jorge Ramos and Larry Bates.

Shows

Orbion Space Technology appears in the exhibitor lists of the Small Satellite Conference 2027, SmallSat Symposium 2027 and Space Tech Expo Europe 2026.

Contact

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