CEO: James Schalkwyk Contact: [email protected] Location: San Francisco | Phoenix
Data is the currency of the information age—and this is just as true for space as for Earth. The NewSpace economy needs near real-time access to data to thrive. Azora is building the optical ground station (OGS) infrastructure to deliver secure, high-speed connectivity for all orbits, from LEO to the Lunar surface.
On Earth, data races across millions of kilometers of fiber at terabit speeds. In space, we’re still stuck in the dial-up era, relying on intermittent, expensive, heavily regulated RF downlink.
But demand for space based data is surging, expected exceed 125,000 PB by 2030.
Operators are already adopting inter-satellite optical links for secure, Gb-speed transfer *in space—*but to bring that data down, they must still fall back to RF. If downlink capacity grows at its current linear trajectory, the gap between demand and supply will reach 80,000 PB/yr in 2030.
The obvious answer: point optical transceivers down to Earth, unlocking >Gb/s data rates.
The catch: clouds
On our cloudy planet, maintaining uptime comparable to RF systems requires 5-10× more stations: or as many as 300 worldwide. Current optical ground station designs—often retrofitted astronomical telescopes and mounts with expensive mirrors, adaptive optics, and basic, COTS sensors—cost millions each, making scale impractical. Following this approach, optical will never progress beyond highly specific use cases that prioritize security or occasional high volume data dumps, but don’t require reliable, high speed downlink.
Azora’s answer: design an OGS from the ground up to prioritize scaleability, adaptability, and robustness.
Azora is addressing this by designing optical ground stations from the ground up. We are optimizing the design to enable our end goal: global deployment of hundreds of stations to provide low latency, high throughput comms for any space mission.
What optimization looks like: