With the advent of the fully remote world brought on by the pandemic, it’s difficult to tell what even constitutes a “Portland startup” these days. But given that the CEO and cofounder of Kubos lives here in town, I’m counting it. Which is why I was happy to see that Xplore has announced they’re acquiring Kubos’ Major Tom mission and flight control software platform for satellites and other assets.
“We are a customer-focused commercial space company that is now both a customer and developer of Major Tom,” said Lisa Rich, Xplore Founder and Chief Operating Officer. “As users, developers and stakeholders, the ability to easily connect and setup command and control systems for satellites and constellations is essential. Our unique perspective will enable us to continually improve the features and capabilities of our flight-ready mission control system from the inside out.”
Major Tom is a scalable platform with powerful satellite mission operations and planning tools. The cloud-based software allows operators to perform ground station scheduling, satellite tasking and telemetry monitoring, saving money and time on planning and design. With Major Tom, users operate their missions on a unified cloud platform. It provides the ability to integrate and control ground segment applications and services, and further de-risks mission operations with features that include out-of-the-box ground network integrations, data analytics, real-time dashboards and a customizable commanding API.
Tyler Browder, the Portland resident I mentioned, will join Xplore as Business Development Director for Mission Operations.
For more information on the acquisition, read the Xplore press release.