About Clutch Space Systems
Clutch Space Systems was founded in 2018 and is headquartered at Surrey Research Park in Guildford, Surrey, UK. The company was spun out of research at the University of Surrey and is a member of the SETsquared partnership, one of the world's leading university business incubators. Clutch Space has received backing from investors including Seraphim Space, The Catalyst Accelerator Colorado Springs, Fit 4 Start, and The FSE Group.
The company's core mission is to disrupt the $7.5 billion satellite ground station market by replacing costly legacy hardware with software-defined radio (SDR) technology running in fully virtualised environments on generic servers. Their approach enables ground station operators to deliver over 80% savings in operations and maintenance costs while simultaneously increasing throughput capacity by more than an order of magnitude. The single non-generic hardware element is an SDR board, which dramatically simplifies procurement and logistics.
Clutch Space's technology supports communications for payload and TT&C (Telemetry, Tracking, and Command) backends for satellite, UAV, and HAPS platforms across GEO, MEO, and LEO orbits. Their software-defined architecture supports L, S, X, Ka, and Ku bands as well as VHF and UHF, and additional protocol stacks and modulations can be added purely in software without hardware changes.
The company has collaborated with the European Space Agency (ESA) on innovative satellite communication systems and signed a letter of intent with Kleos Space to demonstrate a micro ground station network for LEO surveillance satellites. Clutch Space also offers complimentary ground stations to universities conducting space industry research, supporting the broader new space ecosystem.
