Bridgit Mendler's space startup Northwood passes first test, connecting prototype antenna to Planet satellites

Northwood Space, the startup led by former television star and singer Bridgit Mendler, passed its first major development test last week by connecting with Planet Labs imagery satellites in orbit.

“We’re building this global network to send data for satellites, built off of phased array technology that we have now successfully validated, both in the lab and in the field,” Mendler, Northwood’s CEO, told CNBC.

El Segundo, California-based Northwood, unveiled earlier this year, is focused on the ground side of the space connectivity equation. Ground stations are the vital link for transmitting data to and from orbit and are especially crucial for operating and controlling satellites.

The startup is developing ground stations to be mass-produced and betting that its phased array-based system, called Portal, can outperform the parabolic dish antennas traditionally used by ground station companies. It’s projecting Portal will be able to connect to as many as 10 satellites at once versus the typical one to three for parabolic dish antennas.

“For Northwood, what we’re wanting to do is introduce a new standard for connectivity for companies,” Mendler said.

The ground station as a service, or GSaaS, market has companies going after the opportunity in managing the Earth-based side of space infrastructure. Along those lines, Amazon has launched its AWS Ground Station service, and satellite communications giant Eutelsat has proposed a nearly $1 billion deal in the sector.

Mendler’s Northwood wants to take GSaaS a step further, eliminating what she sees as “connectivity very much stuck in a different era” of blackouts and “super expensive networks.”

“Analogizing to the cellular industry — where we draw parallels to how cell towers and shared assets like that ultimately have super vertically integrated players — wound up offloading and selling their assets to the tower companies. We expected that the shared model is going to be an efficiency,” Mendler said.

In her view, ground stations are “the third leg of the stool” of space technology, with the other two being rockets, or the cargo vehicles, and satellites, or the orbital infrastructure.

“The industry is really at a point where there’s a lot of appetite for growth, and this is something that we can really interject into the industry and accelerate progress,” Mendler said.

Last week the Northwood team was out in remote Maddock, North Dakota, to test its prototype antenna — “fondly dubbed Frankie,” Mendler noted — by connecting to a Planet satellite in orbit. 

The effort is known as a TT&C — telemetry, tracking and control — test, with Northwood aiming to make contact with Planet’s satellite in both S-band and X-band frequencies. 

“We were able to achieve bi-directional communications for the full duration of a pass with Planet’s satellites and achieved nominal communications for them. They were able to perform their operations as they would on their own system,” Mendler said.

Northwood designed and built Frankie in four months, the company said, and was able to deploy the antenna “from off the truck to live sky testing” in six hours. Planet, with more than 150 imagery satellites in orbit, heralded Northwood’s test as a “major milestone.”

“Northwood is not only solving for historical issues like cost and scale, but has built and successfully field-tested their phased array antenna faster than previously thought possible. We’re proud to be a part of this breakthrough in ground station technology,” Joseph Breu, Planet’s senior director of global ground networks, said in a statement to CNBC.

Northwood has designed two antennas for its Portal system, with a larger 5-by-5-feet S-band frequency antenna and a smaller 18-by-18-inch X-band antenna.

The company plans to deploy Portal sites that can support as many as 10 simultaneous satellite connections, with data rates over 1 gigabit per second per beam, beginning next year. Northwood is currently assessing locations in the U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand for its first Portal sites.

“Performance-wise, we achieved everything we were hoping to achieve,” Mendler said, adding that Northwood is “really grateful for [Planet’s] participation and support throughout the test.”

“It just unlocks a lot of things about the next chapter,” Mendler said.