Science fiction stories have frequently inspired real-life inventions.
Martin Cooper, for example, the Motorola employee considered the father of the modern cell-phone, was stirred to innovate by the communicators used in the television series Star Trek, a fact made especially clear with the 1996 release of the StarTAC flip phone.
Years earlier, in 1945, Arthur C. Clarke, who would later write 2001: A Space Odyssey, published an article in Wireless World titled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays,” in which he posited that just three satellites in geostationary orbit could provide communication capabilities for the entire planet. That idea became a reality with the launch of Syncom 3 in 1964. To honor his contribution, this path—22,000 miles above the earth—is referred to as the Clarke Orbit. The satellites there are called the Clarke Belt.
As technology has advanced in the six decades since that first satellite launch, so has demand for more advanced technology. As of May 4, 2024, more than 9,900 satellites orbit Earth, a third of which’re dedicated to communication. Thirty percent of the total were launched by the United States. The next closest share belongs to China, with just five percent of the current fleet.
Five satellites were put into orbit by Astranis, a company co-founded in 2015 by John Gedmark and Ryan McLinko. According to Christian Keil, Vice President of External Relations, the name rhymes with Tron and signifies “we are of the stars.”
Gedmark holds an master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Stanford University and co-founded the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry association for companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic. In that position Gedmark helped privatize transport of NASA astronauts to low Earth orbit, a change worth more than $10 billion to the commercial space industry.
McLinko also has a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and interned at SpaceX before heading the mechanical and electrical design teams at Planet Labs, assisting with construction of its first imaging spacecraft.
In 2021, Astranis became the sole occupant of 153,000 square feet of manufacturing and office space in the historic Union Iron Works at Pier 70. At full capacity, the facility will produce up to two satellites a month, a feat requiring an array of specialized processes that can only be performed by experts.
“There are bigger homes for traditional aerospace,” said Keil, but for what Astranis does, San Francisco “is where the world’s best engineers are based.”
Four hundred and twenty people are employed to produce the company’s specialty: a new class of satellite called the MicroGEO that achieves high-orbit capabilities at lower costs thanks to its much smaller size. This combination is important because with loftier placement fewer satellites are required to provide constant service, reducing expenses, creating savings that can be passed on to customers. Together, these factors make the Clarke Orbit – also called GEO, an acronym for Geostationary Equatorial Orbit – the most valuable real estate in the solar system, with more than $15 billion worth of satellites joining the Clarke Belt every year.
Since its first launch in 2018, Astranis has set the record for scaling faster than any other GEO operator in history, launching more satellites than the three next-biggest companies combined. Its most recent mission, in December of 2024, sent four satellites to the Clarke Belt, where they’ll connect millions of people in the Philippines, Mexico, and the United States to affordable broadband internet; many for the first time.
With plans to launch another five satellites in 2025, Astranis looks like it’ll continue setting records at home with the stars.
Tamala Motta 
S Anne Steinberg