Our story
Five engineers, one rented rooftop in Cluj, and a stubborn belief that smallsat operators shouldn't need their own iron to talk to their birds.
Timeline
| 2022-Q2 | Founded as a side project after the SmallSat Bucharest meetup. First antenna goes live on a department roof at UTCN. |
| 2022-Q4 | First paying customer (a CubeSat ops team operating out of Tartu). Rented rack space, built the scheduling API in a weekend. |
| 2023-Q1 | Second site online in Brno. SatNOGS bridge implemented for community operators. |
| 2023-Q3 | Series-seed (small, friends-and-family). Hired a second full-time engineer. |
| 2024-Q2 | S-band downlink added at Cluj. Customer count peaks at 31 active operators. |
| 2025-Q1 | Anchor customer (Halcyon Aerospace) renews for one year. |
| 2025-Q4 | Halcyon notifies us they will not renew — they have stood up their own ground network. |
| 2026-Q1 | Wind-down decision. New accounts closed, existing passes honored through cycle end. Operator data export window opens. |
Offboarding
Operators with stored captures should pull them via the standard signed-URL flow before the cycle ends. After that, the object store is decommissioned. We will not retain copies. Scheduling cron jobs pointed at our API should be disabled — anything still firing after the wind-down will only generate 404s on whoever inherits the IP block.
If you operated against Aphelion Relay, please double-check your scheduling crons after the cycle ends. We have observed some operators leaving stale POST jobs running for months past contract end. Be a good neighbor to whichever IP block we hand back.