A recent Bluetooth connection between a device on Earth and a satellite in orbit signals a potential new space race—this time, for global location-tracking networks.

Seattle-based startup Hubble Network announced today that it had a letter of understanding with San Francisco-based startup Life360 to develop a global, satellite-based Internet of Things (IoT) tracking system. The announcement follows on the heels of a 29 April announcement from Hubble Network that it had established the first Bluetooth connection between a device on Earth and a satellite. The pair of announcements sets the stage for an IoT tracking system that aims to rival Apple’s AirTags, Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag2, and the Cube GPS Tracker.

Bluetooth, the wireless technology that connects home speakers and earbuds to phones, typically traverses meters, not hundreds of kilometers (520 km, in the case of Hubble Network’s two orbiting satellites). The trick to extending the tech’s range, Hubble Network says, lies in the startup’s patented, high-sensitivity signal detection system on a LEO satellite.

“We believe this is comparable to when GPS was first made available for public use.” —Alex Haro, Hubble Network

The caveat, however, is that the connection is device-to-satellite only. The satellite can’t ping devices back on Earth to say “signal received,” for example. This is because location-tracking tags operate on tiny energy budgets—often powered by button-sized batteries and running on a single charge for months or even years at a stretch. Tags are also able to perform only minimal signal processing. That means that tracking devices cannot include the sensitive phased-array antennas and digital beamforming needed to tease out a vanishingly tiny Bluetooth signal racing through the stratosphere.

“There is a massive enterprise and industrial market for ‘send only’ applications,” says Alex Haro, CEO of Hubble Network. “Once deployed, these sensors and devices don’t need Internet connectivity except to send out their location and telemetry data, such as temperature, humidity, shock, and moisture. Hubble enables sensors and asset trackers to be deployed globally in a very battery- and cost-efficient manner.”

Other applications for the company’s technologies, Haro says, include asset tracking, environmental monitoring, container and pallet tracking, predictive maintenance, smart agriculture applications, fleet management, smart buildings, and electrical grid monitoring.

“To give you a sense of how much better Hubble Network is compared to existing satellite providers like Globalstar,” Haro says, “We are 50 times cheaper and have 20 times longer battery life. For example, we can build a Tile device that is locatable anywhere in the world without any cellular reception and lasts for years on a single coin cell battery. This will be a game-changer in the AirTag market for consumers.”

Hubble Network chief space officer John Kim (left) and two company engineers perform tests on the company’s signal-sensing satellite technology. Hubble Network

The Hubble Network system—and presumably the enhanced Life360 Tags that should follow today’s announcement—use a lower energy iteration of the familiar Bluetooth wireless protocol.

Like its more famous cousin, Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) uses the 2.4 gigahertz band—a globally unlicensed spectrum band that many Wi-Fi routers, microwave ovens, baby monitors, wireless microphones, and other consumer devices also use.

Haro says BLE offered the most compelling, supposedly “short-range” wireless standard for Hubble Network’s purposes. By contrast, he says, the long-range, wide-area network LoRaWAN operates on a communications band, 900 megahertz, that some countries and regions regulate differently from others—making a potentially global standard around it that much more difficult to establish and maintain. Plus, he says, 2.4 GHz antennas can be roughly one-third the size of a standard LoRaWAN antenna, which makes a difference when launching material into space, when every gram matters.

Haro says that Hubble Network’s technology does require changing the sending device’s software in order to communicate with a BLE receiver satellite in orbit. And it doesn’t require any hardware modifications of the device, save one—adding a standard BLE antenna. “This is the first time that a Bluetooth chip can send data from the ground to a satellite in orbit,” Haro says. “We require the Hubble software stack loaded onto the chip to make this possible, but no physical modifications are needed. Off-the-shelf BLE chips are now capable of communicating directly with LEO satellites.”

“We believe this is comparable to when GPS was first made available for public use,” Haro adds. “It was a groundbreaking moment in technology history that significantly impacted everyday users in ways previously unavailable.”

What remains, of course, is the next hardest part: Launching all of the satellites needed to create a globally available tracking network. As to whether other companies or countries will be developing their own competitor technologies, now that Bluetooth has been revealed to have long-range communication capabilities, Haro did not speculate beyond what he envisions for his own company’s LEO ambitions.

“We currently have our first two satellites in orbit as of 4 March,” Haro says. “We plan to continue launching more satellites, aiming to have 32 in orbit by early 2026. Our pilot customers are already updating and testing their devices on our network, and we will continue to scale our constellation over the next 3 to 5 years.”

A changing of the guard in space stations is on the horizon as private companies work toward providing new opportunities for science, commerce, and tourism in outer space.

Blue Origin is one of a number of private-sector actors aiming to harbor commercial activities in low Earth orbit (LEO) as the creaking and leaking International Space Station (ISS) approaches its drawdown. Partners in Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef program, including firms Redwire, Sierra Space, and Boeing, are each reporting progress in their respective components of the program. The collaboration itself may not be on such strong ground. Such endeavors may also end up slowed and controlled by regulation so far absent from many new, commercial areas of space.

Orbital Reef recently aced testing milestones for its critical life support system, with assistance from NASA. These included hitting targets for trace contaminant control, water contaminant oxidation, urine water recovery, and water tank tests—all of which are required to operate effectively and efficiently to enable finite resources to keep delicate human beings alive in orbit for long timeframes.

Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, is characteristically tight-lipped on its progress and challenges and declined to provide further comment on progress beyond NASA’s life-support press statement.

The initiative is backed by NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations (CLD) program, through which the agency is providing funding to encourage the private sector to build space habitats. NASA may also be the main client starting out, although the wider goal is to foster a sustainable commercial presence in LEO.

The Space-Based Road Ahead

The challenge Orbital Reef faces is considerable: reimagining successful earthbound technologies—such as regenerative life-support systems, expandable habitats and 3D printing—but now in orbit, on a commercially viable platform. The technologies must also adhere to unforgiving constraints of getting mass and volume to space, and operating on a significantly reduced budget compared to earlier national space station programs.

Add to that autonomy and redundancy that so many mission-critical functions will demand, as well as high-bandwidth communications required to return data and allow streaming and connectivity for visitors.

In one recent step forward for Orbital Reef, Sierra Space, headquartered in Louisville, Colo., performed an Ultimate Burst Pressure (UBP) test on its architecture in January. This involved inflating, to the point of failure, the woven fabric pressure shell—including Vectran, a fabric that becomes rigid and stronger than steel when pressurized on orbit—for its Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) habitat. Sierra’s test reached 530,000 pascals (77 pounds per square inch) before it burst—marking a successful failure that far surpassed NASA’s recommended safety level of 419,200 Pa (60.8 psi).

Notably, the test article was 300 cubic meters in volume, or one-third the volume of ISS—a megaproject constructed by some 15 countries over more than 30 launches. LIFE will contain 10 crew cabins along with living, galley, and gym areas. This is expected to form part of the modular Orbital Reef complex. The company stated last year it aimed to launch a pathfinder version of LIFE around the end of 2026.

Inflating and Expanding Expectations

Whereas the size of ISS modules and those of China’s new, three-module Tiangong space station, constructed in 2021–22, was dependent on the size of the payload bay or fairing of the shuttle or rocket doing the launching, using expandable quarters allows Orbital Reef to offer habitable areas multiples (in this case five times) greater than the volume of the 5-meter rocket fairing to be used to transport the system to orbit.

Other modules will include Node, with an airlock and docking facilities, also developed by Sierra Space, as well as a spherical Core module developed by Blue Origin. Finally, Boeing is developing a research module, which will include a science cupola, akin to that on the ISS, external payload facilities, and a series of laboratories.

Orbital Reef will be relying on some technologies developed for and spun off from the ISS project, which was completed in 2011 at a cost of US $100 billion. The new station will be operating on fractions of such budgets, with Blue Origin awarded $130 million of a total $415.6 million given to three companies in 2021.

“NASA is using a two-phase strategy to, first, support the development of commercial destinations and, secondly, enable the agency to purchase services as one of many customers” says NASA spokesperson Anna Schneider, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

For instance, Northrop Grumman is working on its Persistent Platform to provide autonomous and robotic capabilities for commercial science and manufacturing capabilities in LEO.

Such initiatives could face politically constructed hurdles, however. Last year, some industry advocates opposed a White House proposal that would see new commercial space activities such as space stations regulated.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency (ESA) signed a memorandum of understanding in late 2023 with Airbus and Voyager Space, headquartered in Denver, which would give ESA access to a planned Starlab space station after the ISS is transitioned out. That two-module orbital outpost will also be inflatable and is now expected to be launched in 2028.

China also is exploring opening its Tiangong station to commercial activities, including its own version of NASA’s commercial cargo and extending the station with new modules—and new competition for the world’s emerging space station sector.