Enpulsion

Enpulsion mass-produces ion thrusters in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Its field emission design, FEEP, holds indium metal that a heated, crown-shaped emitter turns into a fine spray of ions; there is no tank, no valve and no gas. The thrusters come off a production line as catalog items, the Nano and Micro lines for cubesats and small satellites, Nexus for larger spacecraft, and a controller called Cortex for running clusters of them.

Alexander Reissner founded it in 2016 out of FOTEC, the research arm of the Wiener Neustadt technical university, where the thruster was developed; the first unit demonstrated itself in orbit in early 2018. The bet was that smallsat builders would rather pick propulsion from a catalog than commission it, even at FEEP's very low thrust.

The volume argument has largely been won. By its own count over 280 of its systems are in space, which puts it among the most-flown electric propulsion makers anywhere, and customers like Blue Canyon Technologies and Astro Digital vouch for it publicly. In 2026 it raised new money to expand in the United States. The physics still sets the boundary: FEEP thrust sits at millinewtons and below, which caps the missions it can serve, and the smallsat propulsion market it leads is full of companies attacking from every other technology.