An aerospace startup that aims to provide a method to build living and industrial structures in space, communications systems and solar arrays to beam energy to Earth has opened its headquarters in Golden.
Rendezvous Robotics formally started in November 2024 after about eight years of developing and testing technology that uses programmed tiles that autonomously assemble themselves to form modular structures and reconfigure when needed. Strong magnets help the tiles click in place.
The tiles can be stacked in a rocket and released at their destination to start forming a structure. During a TED talk in April, Ariel Ekblaw, inventor of the patented technology and co-founder of Rendezvous Robotics, said her team jokes the process is like “a glorified” PEZ candy dispenser.
The magnets bring the modular tiles together to “dock, to rendezvous,” Ekblaw said. “Think about space Legos with magnets that click, click, click into place.”
The company opened for business a few weeks ago in Golden. Rendezvous recently secured $3 million in pre-seed funding to commercialize the technology invented while Ekblaw was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The funding was led by Aurelia Foundry and 8090 Industries, with participation from ATX Venture Partners, Mana Ventures and a group of other investors. Most of the company’s 10 staffers, including Joe Landon, are in the Denver area.
Landon, Rendezvous co-founder and president, has worked for other aerospace companies, including Lockheed Martin in Jefferson County. He first met Ekblaw through his work at Lockheed. He, Ekblaw and Phil Frank, co-founder and CEO of Rendezvous, settled on the Denver area as the company’s home.
“It wasn’t just convenient that Joe was there and that there is a great talent pool in the Denver metro area in aerospace and defense, but a lot of people wanted to move there,” said Frank, an experienced technology executive and self-described serial entrepreneur who lives outside of Boston.
Members of the Rendezvous team previously worked for NASA and such companies as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin and Nokia. The company is looking at serving clients in both the commercial and defense sectors and was keeping an eye on whether President Donald Trump would move U.S. Space Command out of Colorado.
Last month, Trump announced that Space Command would be moved to Alabama, reversing the Biden administration’s decision to keep the headquarters in Colorado Springs. The decision didn’t deter Rendezvous from locating in Colorado. Landon said there’s so much space and defense activity and military facilities stretching along the Front Range, from Boulder to Colorado Springs.
“Quite a few of the folks that we will need to talk to are still going to be here,” Landon said.
The staff could grow by as many as 50 people within a year, Landon added. And in the next year, Rendezvous expects to demonstrate its technology on the International Space Station. The technology called TESSERAE — Tessellated Electromagnetic Space Structures for the Exploration of Reconfigurable, Adaptive Environments — has previously been tested on the space station as well as in low Earth orbit and on flights simulating weightlessness.
The goal is to more easily build infrastructure in space. A significant obstacle now is being able to get the building blocks where they’re needed.
“What we’re looking at is an alternative to the way we build spacecraft systems today, which is we have to build them on the ground,” Landon said. “And we have to design them to be folded up and then unfolded once they get into space because they have to fit into a rocket.”
The International Space Station and James Webb Space Telescope took numerous trips to space to construct, Frank said. Astronauts building the space station were put in harm’s way, he added.
Using Rendezvous Robotics’ technology, Frank said the company can progressively send more and more material up and build bigger and bigger structures. He said the company will try to use more consumer electronics to make the process faster and less expensive.
“We’re not going to use a person with a joystick sitting on the ground,” Frank said. “We’re going to program the software to be able to figure out how to do it on its own.”
During her TED talk, Ekblaw said applications of the technology might include building factories to manufacture products such as therapeutic drugs that are easier to manufacture in a low-gravity environment. “It turns out that in microgravity protein crystals grow differently. Certain types of tissues grow faster or mature better.”
Another possibility is to assemble thousands of solar panels in orbit, Ekblaw said. Sunlight could be captured and beamed to Earth, even at night.
Ekblaw founded the Aurelia Institute, a nonprofit space architecture research and development lab, education and outreach center.
The conditions in low orbit, 100 to 1,200 miles above the Earth, can make for easier manipulation of materials, speed up development cycles and provide new insights into research on cures for diseases because cell cultures grow differently. More businesses are interested in taking advantage of the properties of space, according to a report by McKinsey & Company.