Magdrive has recently expanded its R&D capabilities following a £1.4M investment
from prestigious VCs that include Founders Fund.
Previously based in a small start-up lab at Harwell Innovation Campus, Magdrive has now relocated
to a larger 2000 sq ft laboratory. This has enabled the company to bring major diagnostic equipment on-site, such as its own vacuum chamber, high voltage enclosures, and space qualification test beds.
Magdrive has expanded its team with Dr. Christos Stavrou and Savva Theocharous, numerical
and experimental physicists with careers in nuclear fusion.
They will be instrumental in developing Magdrive’s unique magnetic field topologies, which enable
the small and powerful thruster to outperform existing electrical systems by more than 10-fold in
thrust. Another addition to the team is Henry Eshbaugh, an embedded systems engineer, previously
the electronics lead on the RadCube-MAGIC magnetometer.
Magdrive says it is on a mission to build the next generation of spacecraft propulsion for small satellites. They says the system is both small and powerful, with “high efficiencies for a long mission lifetime and the responsiveness of a chemical system needed to develop new space missions such as orbital manufacturing and asteroid mining.”