Behind the scenes: OPS-SAT VOLT progress from the Craft Prospect lab

A lot of incredible work happens in Craft’s state-of-the-art engineering lab. Thanks to our stellar team, that work has been translating into significant progress across the OPS-SAT VOLT project.

Here are just a couple of our recent milestones:

🛰 The Flat Sat is complete and all systems are go! This means that our entire VOLT payload is spread out across a testbench and we are able to see that our design works as we expect, with all subsystems communicating successfully with one another. We now have a fully-functional testing platform that we can build on to demonstrate the core mission requirements within a representative system — and we can start more complex testing and demonstrating! Many members of the Craft team were involved in this project. Hats off in particular to Ahren McTaggart for leading the effort!

🔭 We are in the final stages of aligning VOLT’s optical system! The optical system supports bi-directional optical links across multiple wavelength channels. This system must not only deliver reliable communication, but also withstand the harsh conditions of launch and the environment of space. Achieving alignment means we’ve found the ‘sweet spot’ that ensures the laser beam is broad enough to stay on target, yet concentrated enough for the detector on the ground to pick it up clearly. This exciting work has been carried out by Quantum Communications Engineer Rachael Steven, Optical Engineer Robert Wishart, and our Chief Engineer for Optics Luis José Salazar-Serrano.

As we move closer to launch, we’re excited to bring you deeper inside the mission and the engineering behind it. We’ll be sharing a lot more about OPS-SAT VOLT in the new year, including spotlights on:

🎯 The dedicated VOLT payloads and subsystems

🤝 Our mission partners

🧠 The amazing team of engineers bringing the project to life