ThrustMe


ThrustMe is a deep tech company that designs miniaturized aerospace thrusters for small satellites, increasing the life of satellites and making them more affordable.
The company builds gridded ion thrusters and cold gas thrusters.
WWW thrustme.fr𝕏 thrustme_IG thrustme.spaceIN 11109776

History

ThrustMe was founded in 2017 by Ane Aanesland and Dmytro Rafalskyi, who previously worked at the École Polytechnique and CNRS as researchers in plasma physics and electric propulsion. Initially, the startup was incubated in Agoranov. Also in 2017, ThrustMe raised 1.7 million euros for its development.
In 2018, ThrustMe received €2.4 million from the European Commission to commercialise electric propulsion for nanosatellites.
In 2019, Ane Aanesland received the CNRS innovation medal for her entrepreneurial activities. The same year, Spacety and ThrustMe maneuvered for the first time a satellite using iodine as propellant, with a cold-gas thruster.
In 2021, ThrustMe, in partnership with Spacety, achieved the first in-orbit demonstration of an electric propulsion system powered by iodine. The results were published as a research article in the journal Nature, where the maneuvers described resulted in a cumulative altitude change above 3 km.
According to the European Space Agency, in regard to the use of iodine rather than Xenon in a gridded ion thruster, "This small but potentially disruptive innovation could help to clear the skies of space junk, by enabling tiny satellites to self-destruct cheaply and easily at the end of their missions, by steering themselves into the atmosphere where they would burn up."

Flight missions

Ongoing

Announced

NorSat-TD is a microsatellite developed by the UTIAS Space Flight Laboratory for the Norwegian space agency. The satellite was scheduled to be launched in the first quarter of 2022.

Awards