Get To Know The Brothers Who Are Building Massive Spacecrafts Guided By SpaceX's Technology

By going against the industry trend of building massive satellites in a bet that towering rockets such as SpaceX's Starship will be the way forward in the future, a pair of brothers are attempting to change the way spacecraft are built.

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K2 Space, founded in Los Angeles by CEO Karan Kunjur and CTO Neel Kunjur, is creating satellite buses - the physical structure of a spacecraft that provides power, movement, and more.

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K2 is going the other way, while manufacturers have pushed to optimize spacecraft by designing as light and compact as possible, creating satellites that weigh in the tens to hundreds of kilograms, while manufacturers have pushed to optimize spacecraft by designing as light and compact as possible. By designing systems that are on par with some of the biggest spacecraft ever built, K2 is going the other way.

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“There was only one path to go cheaper over the last decade, which was to go smaller in size. We are now discovering that due to the new launch capabilities of vehicles like Starship, there actually is an interesting opportunity to go in the opposite direction," Karan Kunjur told Trade Algo.

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Due to a growing level of competition in the rocket launch market over the past few years, the cost per kilogram of delivering spacecraft into orbit has also decreased in the past few years. There is also a lot of opportunity beyond Starship that K2 sees, including rockets in the "heavy" and "super heavy" classes, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, or those in development like United Launch Alliance's Vulcan, Blue Origin's New Glenn, or Relativity's Terran R.

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“We are building this so that it can support multiple launch vehicles, and we are planning for a world where there will be multiple launch providers in the future,” Karan Kunjur said.

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A play on Karan and Neel's names and a nod to astronomer Nikolai Kardashev's concept of scales of civilization, K2 Space is the brothers' first venture together and a fusion of their previously divergent careers. The former spent 10 years working in turnarounds and acquisitions for Boston Consulting Group before becoming a vice president at artificial intelligence startup Text IQ, which was later acquired by Google in 2021. At SpaceX, he spent about six years developing systems for the Dragon spacecraft, which is now flying cargo and crew to and from the International Space Station, a spacecraft that he helped develop. After spending a few years with the electric aircraft company Kittyhawk, he realized that he wanted to get back into the space business after having been away for a while.

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“The goal is to apply similar engineering principles to a different scale, one that has never been explored before in the industry,” Neel Kunjur explained.

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The company was incorporated in June and has since raised a total of $8.5 million in a seed round led by First Round Capital and Republic Capital, and joined by Countdown Capital, Boost VC, Also Capital, Side Door Ventures, Earthrise Ventures, Spacecadet VC and Pathbreaker Ventures. As part of its investment strategy, First Round has previously invested in a wide range of space companies, including Planet, which is now a publicly traded satellite company backed by First Round.

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At the moment, the brothers have chosen to hire seven people to join them - people with previous experience at SpaceX, Maxar, Arianespace, Blue Origin, and many more - and are in the process of securing a 15,000-square-foot factory in Torrance, California, area.

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As part of its business strategy, K2 has also built an impressive list of advisors, which includes former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, former SpaceX director for Commercial Crew and Cargo program Abhi Tripathi, former SES chief technology officer Martin Halliwell, and Lee Rosen, former United States Assisting SpaceX as vice president of mission and launch operations, I served as commander of the Air Force Space Launch Group.

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With the K2, the company plans on offering satellite buses of this size at prices that would be unheard of for satellite buses of this size. Currently, the company is planning to build the K2 Mega, which will transport a payload mass of one ton, for a cost of $15 million per unit, and the K2 Giga, which will transport a payload mass of 15 tons, for a cost of $30 million per unit. By developing new systems such as power, attitude control, thermal control, and others, they believe that they will be able to reach those price points.

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“There is a big difference between our spacecraft and the satellites that exist today, both large and small. In order to create new technologies that trade mass and cost in a new way, we need to relook at the components and do a lot of in-house development to come up with a new method of trading mass and cost,” Neel Kunjur said.

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So far, K2 has received two small development awards from the government, and it has signed agreements with potential customers for commercial, research, and defense applications for its technology.

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Karan Kunjur said that he envisions a future when they can use our platform to relax these constraints and be able to build the payloads that they’ve always wanted, which sit on top of the platform, which they’ve always wanted to build.

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There is a plan for the company to launch its first spacecraft of the Mega class in 2024, followed by a first flight with customers in 2025.

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“SpaceX has demonstrated the importance of iteration firsthand, and we aim to improve our learning cycles so that we can get to space soon enough, learn from those components, see how they function in the space environment and tweak those designs in anticipation of our full launch in 2025,” Neel Kunjur said.

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“This has the potential to be a game changer in the way we operate in space if we get this right,” Karan Kunjur said.

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