ThrustMe

ThrustMe makes electric thrusters that run on iodine. Xenon, the standard propellant, is expensive, scarce, and has to be stored at high pressure; iodine is cheap, three times denser, and sits as a solid block until heated. The NPT30, the main product, packs a gridded ion thruster and its propellant into roughly a one-litre unit that bolts onto a small satellite, and the factory near Paris is built to turn out a thruster a day.

Ane Aanesland and Dmytro Rafalskyi spun the company out of the plasma physics laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique in 2017. Their argument was that propulsion should be a manufactured product with a price list rather than an engineering project, and that satellite constellations would buy it by the dozen.

The physics is settled and published. In December 2020 an NPT30 aboard a Spacety satellite became the first iodine electric propulsion ever fired in orbit, and the results appeared in Nature the following year. By June 2025 the hundredth ThrustMe unit had reached orbit, twenty-six of them on a single rideshare, and in 2026 the company signed contracts above ten million euros to equip forty Japanese Earth observation satellites. The limits are also clear. Thrust is measured in millinewtons, which confines it to small satellites, and the higher-power Hall thruster meant to move it up a class has not flown; its first demonstration is set for late 2026.