Epic Aerospace

EPIC Aerospace builds Chimera, a chemical-propulsion space tug for delivering small satellites to orbits that rideshare launches cannot reach, up to and including geostationary orbit. Founded in 2019 by Ignacio Belieres Montero, an Argentine who left Stanford on a Thiel Fellowship, and backed through Y Combinator, it works between Buenos Aires and the United States and says very little in public.

It has flown twice. Chimera LEO-1 went up on a SpaceX rideshare in January 2023 as a free-flying satellite deployer; how that mission ended was never clearly reported. Chimera GEO-1, a 301 kilogram tug with enough propellant to change its velocity by 1.7 kilometres per second, launched in February 2025 carrying a customer's classified cubesat toward geostationary orbit.

GEO-1 failed. The tug transmitted telemetry but could not receive commands, missed its correction burn, and after a lunar flyby on March 3, 2025 drifted into orbit around the Sun with the customer's satellite still aboard. The company has announced nothing since. The idea, a network of inexpensive tugs selling precise placement on the underserved direct-to-geostationary leg, is still worth someone attempting. So far its one revenue mission cost a customer their spacecraft.