The network

The link is narrow on purpose.

Pyxaris is a constellation of small, deliberately simple satellites in low Earth orbit, providing very low data rate connectivity to extremely inexpensive ground devices, anywhere on the planet.

A device sends one short, infrequent check-in. It carries the device's identity and enough for us to establish where it is. Almost nothing else, and largely in one direction.

What this is not

It is not satellite broadband. It is not a messenger, a phone, or a way to move data. Nothing about it competes with the constellations being built to put internet access in remote places, and it would be a poor way to attempt that.

Those systems are engineered to carry as much as possible. This one is engineered to carry as little as possible, and that inversion is where the entire advantage comes from.

Why the constraint is the design

The physics here is well understood and not in dispute. A single short burst needs a tiny fraction of the power that voice or continuous data would. Everything that makes the product interesting falls out of that one fact.

• Cost. We are designing the device to a target on the order of a dollar at volume. Not a discounted version of an existing product, but a different object with almost nothing in it.
• Endurance. Years of shelf life on a single primary cell, spent almost entirely doing nothing. A device that is never used should still work when it is.
• Independence. No cell tower, no gateway, no pairing with a phone, no terrestrial network of any kind. Coverage is wherever the sky is.
• Deployability. The end device operates within unlicensed short-range rules, so putting one into someone's hand carries no per-country licensing burden.

Sending almost nothing is what makes the device almost free.

On spectrum and licensing

We are precise about this because it is the thing most easily overclaimed. The end device carries no per-country licensing burden. That is a statement about the device, and it is the part that makes wide distribution practical.

The space segment is a different regime entirely, and we do not pretend otherwise. Operating a constellation requires a filing through a sponsoring administration, a national space station licence, orbital debris and end-of-life compliance, and market access authorisation in each country of commercial operation. That work is a real part of the company, not a footnote to it.

The space segment

Small satellites carrying a deliberately simple payload, on a commercial off-the-shelf bus, launched as rideshare. There is no advantage to us in exotic hardware, and considerable advantage in boring, proven, replaceable hardware that we can build many of.

The business underneath

A distress beacon is the first application of this network, not the whole of it. The same physics serves a far less dramatic and much larger market: low-rate global telemetry for assets, infrastructure and logistics in places terrestrial networks do not reach, sold per device per year.

Satellite connectivity for this kind of traffic is already a multi-billion-dollar market. We do not need a large share of it. A network priced at a few dollars per device per year is a substantial business at tens of millions of devices, and the cost floor we are designing to is what makes tens of millions plausible in the first place.