SAN FRANCISCO – Spanish startup Kreios Space announced plans Aug. 4 to conduct the first very low Earth orbit (VLEO) demonstration of its air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) in a Kongsberg NanoAvionics microsatellite bus.
“Partnering with NanoAvionics in our first in-orbit flight provides us with a satellite bus and market-leading experience necessary to allow us to test our new technology in confidence,” Kreios CEO Adrián Senar said in a statement.
Senar declined to comment on the timing of the flight. Kreios’ website says the “the first-ever ABEP-based VLEO mission,” will occur in 2027 with a second flight in 2028.
Senar co-founded Kreios in 2021 with five aerospace engineering classmates from the Polytechnic School of Catalonia to develop ABEP to enable satellites to remain at an orbital altitude of about 200 kilometers. ABEP is designed to collect atmospheric gases including oxygen and nitrogen to serve as propellant for electric thrusters.
Given atmospheric drag, traditional electric propulsion systems would require large quantities of propellant to remain in orbit, “which makes either the lifetime of the satellite too short for commercial missions or the mass of propellant to carry onboard too heavy to make sense,” Senar told SpaceNews by email. With Kreios’ air-breathing electric propulsion, “the altitude can be sustained without requiring any propellant on board, which enables long-term missions in these altitudes at equivalent costs that you would find at 500” kilometers.
Optical payload
Kreios’ ABEP will share NanoAvionics’ MP42 microsatellite bus with an optical payload that has not been identified. NanoAvionics will customize the MP42 bus for the mission, integrate the optical payload, perform system testing and commission the platform, before Kreios takes operational control.
“From its very low Earth orbit, the mission will validate the performance of its ABEP thruster, take measurements of the environment, and capture sub-meter resolution images in the visible and near-infrared spectral range,” according to the news release.
“Kreios is tackling one of the most demanding operating environments in space, and this mission joins a very short list of European VLEO initiatives,” Kongsberg NanoAvionics CEO Atle Wøllo said in a statement. “Our engineering team has worked closely with Kreios to configure the MP42 satellite bus to the mission’s specific requirements, and support the integration of Kreios’ technology.”
Growing interest
Commercial interest in operating satellites in VLEO is growing because the altitude offers promise for high-resolution Earth observation and low-latency communications. Two experimental Chinese satellites are operating at altitudes of less than 300 kilometers.
U.S. and European commercial VLEO operators plan to conduct their first flights in the next two years, “so the field belongs to whoever proves a mission first,” according to a VLEO Overview and Market Map from Whipsmart Ventures.
Like Kreios, Viridian Space Corp., the European Space Agency Propulsion Laboratory and Indian startup Orbitt Space are developing and testing ABEP systems.
In 2025, Kreios raised 8 million euros ($9.21 million) in a 2025 Seed round and NATO selected the startup to join its 2026 Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA).
