The Exploration Company

Nyx is a pressurised capsule about four metres across and seven tall, massing roughly eight tonnes, sized to carry around four tonnes to orbit and bring two and a half back, and to fly perhaps five times. It burns methalox rather than the hypergolics capsules have traditionally used, and it flies free rather than depending on a station's schedule. The gap it aims at is specific: Europe can launch almost anything and return almost nothing, so every kilogram that comes home from orbit currently comes home in an American vehicle.

The founders built the European Service Module for Orion and worked on ATV at Airbus and ArianeGroup, so they know exactly how the continent's primes price a capsule and how long they take. The company's method is the opposite one. Fly small, cheap demonstrators quickly and accept that some will be lost. Helene Huby has been open that this is a deliberate trade, and that Mission Possible carried single-string subsystems and a parachute system that was never drop-tested before it flew.

That trade came due in June 2025. Mission Possible, a 1,600 kg subscale capsule, powered its payloads, stabilised itself, survived reentry and came back through the communications blackout. Contact was then lost at about 26 kilometres, just before the transonic phase, the parachutes never deployed, and the capsule was destroyed on impact with the ocean. The company calls it a partial success, which is fair as far as it goes; Aviation Week's headline was "Nyx Capsule Lost After Reentry", which is also fair. More than a year later no root cause has been published. A drop test over the Mojave in May 2026 exercised the drogue-to-main handover successfully, a partial answer rather than a closed loop, and the first full-scale flight to the ISS is targeted for 2028 against a station scheduled for deorbit around 2030.