SecondStar

Second Star was founded in 2022 by a team from the Satellite Applications Catapult and Imperial College London to address a critical bottleneck in the small satellite market: affordable, rapidly-produced chemical propulsion. With dozens of new satellites launching every week and growing regulatory pressure on orbital debris mitigation requiring active deorbit capability, demand for maneuvering propulsion has surged far beyond what legacy manufacturers can supply.

The company core innovation is its 2D+ fabrication manufacturing methodology that reduces thruster production time from three weeks to two days, while simultaneously lowering cost and maintaining high performance. Their propulsion systems use a hydrogen-oxygen propellant — avoiding the hazardous hypergolic fuels common in legacy systems — and are designed to scale across applications from CubeSats to launch vehicles and hypersonic platforms. Second Star successfully tested the first H2-O2 aerospike thruster in Europe.

Second Star manufactures and tests at Westcott Venture Park in Buckinghamshire, home of the UK National Space Propulsion Test Facility, with commercial operations at Harwell Space Cluster in Oxfordshire. The company is a graduate of the ESA Business Incubation Centre UK (2023-2024 cohort) and has raised early-stage funding for commercial scale-up.