Hubble Network has become the first company in history to establish a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite, a validation of critical technology for the company, potentially opening the door to connecting millions more devices anywhere in the world.
The Seattle-based startup launched its first two satellites into orbit on SpaceX's Transporter-10 rideshare mission in March; The company has since confirmed that it has received signals from the integrated 3.5mm Bluetooth chips from more than 600 kilometers away.
The sky is truly the limit for space-enabled Bluetooth devices: The startup says its technology can be used in markets including logistics, livestock tracking, smart collars for pets, GPS watches for children, car inventory, construction and soil temperature monitoring. Haro said the easiest are those industries that are desperate for network coverage even once a day, such as remote asset monitoring for the oil and gas industry. As the constellation grows, Hubble will turn its attention to sectors that may need more frequent updates, such as soil monitoring, to continuous coverage use cases, such as fall monitoring for seniors.
Once up and running, the customer will simply need to integrate their devices' chipsets with a piece of firmware to enable connection to the Hubble network.
Hubble was founded in 2021 by Life360 co-founder Alex Haro, Iotera founder Ben Wild (who sold his startup to Ring), and aerospace engineer John Kim. Haro said that when Wild first presented the idea of connecting a Bluetooth chip to a satellite, his initial reaction was, “No way.” And it sounds crazy, especially since consumer electronics can have a hard time connecting to other Bluetooth-enabled devices that are just a few feet away.
But the demand is there: Existing IoT devices are power-hungry, expensive to operate, and lack global connectivity, the company says. These are fundamental limitations related to Bluetooth-enabled devices today and prevent many industries from leveraging IoT for their businesses.
The company joined Y Combinator's Winter 2022 cohort and closed a $20 million Series A last March. Hubble's first innovation was to develop software that would allow commercially available Bluetooth chips to communicate over very long distances at low power.
In space, the company also patented a phased array antenna that can be launched from a small satellite. The antennas work almost like a magnifying glass and are what allow a commercially available Bluetooth chip to communicate with the Hubble satellite. The team also had to solve problems related to Doppler: frequency discrepancies occur between fast-moving objects that exchange data via radio waves.
One of Hubble's satellites in a ground-based test chamber.
Hubble intends to launch a third satellite on SpaceX's Transporter-11 mission this summer and a fourth on Transporter-13. Those four satellites will make up what Haro called the “beta constellation,” and pilot customers are starting to activate their integrations even today, he said. The startup plans to launch the next 32 satellites at once in the fourth quarter of 2025 or early 2026, although the launch provider has not yet been selected.
Those 36 satellites will make up Hubble's first “production constellation” and will allow connection to a Hubble satellite for approximately 2 to 3 hours per day from anywhere in the world.
