Bridgit Mendler’s Northwood makes ground station connection with Planet Labs in key test | TechCrunch

Northwood Space, the startup founded by former Disney star Bridgit Mendler, nailed a key test last week when its ground station unit successfully connected with orbiting Planet Labs satellites. 

Operating from Planet’s ground station in Maddock, North Dakota, the team successfully showed the startup’s novel phased-array antenna system can transmit data to and from satellites on orbit. This first test focused on telemetry and tasking of the satellites, and achieved bidirectional links over five satellite passes. 

“The purpose of what we’re doing is building a more performant ground network that can help industrialize the space industry,” Mendler said in a recent interview. “We see connectivity as really a fundamental pillar of expanding space.”  

Northwood is aiming to solve what it calls “the bottleneck for space”: the terrestrial infrastructure that enables satellites to communicate with Earth and vice versa. Typically large dish antennas, these ground stations are a critical part of satellite operations, enabling satellite owners to track, send commands to, and receive data from spacecraft. 

The colossal growth of the space industry has led to a correspondingly large increase in the volume of data traveling to and from satellites. While a few companies, like SpaceX and Amazon, build and operate their own ground stations, many satellite providers pay for capacity with ground station providers. But these services and their ground stations don’t always have availability. El Segundo, California-based Northwood’s solution is to mass produce a digital phased-array system, which it calls a “Portal”, to enable “always-on satellite connectivity.” 

Northwood’s technology is being designed for scale: Unlike traditional parabolic dish antennas, Northwood says its antenna can connect with multiple satellites simultaneously. While traditional antennas need to be physically pointed at a satellite, the beam direction of phased arrays can be electronically steered and track multiple objects at once.

But they’re also being designed for mass manufacturing, with the company initially targeting one antenna system built per month. The systems are also much smaller than traditional ground stations — squares six feet per side — so they could be used at locations where deployment of larger antennas is impossible. 

The company was able to set up the ground station and complete the testing in just six hours. Northwood is aiming to have sites operational in the first half of 2025 and scale production rates and roll out from there. The team is exploring sites both in the U.S. and internationally, Mendler said. 

Northwood, which went public in February, has raised around $6 million in funding from investors including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Also Capital.