Elve qualifies 100-watt amplifiers for spaceflight

A family of 100-watt amplifiers has just moved from engineering work toward the flight line. In San Francisco, California startup Elve says it has qualified a family of millimeter-wave Traveling Wave Tube Amplifiers for the environmental conditions of space — not just one product, but several products built on the same platform.

The point is data. Millimeter waves operate at frequencies that can support high-data-rate connectivity, and Elve CEO Diana Gamzina says high-power amplifiers at those frequencies could give satellite constellations more bandwidth in both directions. Imaging satellites could use the same capability to deliver their data to the ground more quickly.

The technology is a traveling-wave-tube amplifier, a class Elve says can be more efficient than alternative solid-state power amplifiers. Elve’s stated aim is to redesign millimeter-wave amplifiers and bring them to a price at which constellation operators can include them in their system designs. Gamzina founded the company in 2020 after working at research and space institutions including the University of California, Davis, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the European Space Agency.

What changes in practice? If the hardware performs as planned in orbit, satellite builders could have a qualified high-power option for moving large volumes of communications or imaging data, without treating the amplifier as a one-off research component. That could matter especially for constellations. Elve says the next step is an operational-spacecraft demonstration within a year.

That final step has not happened yet. The qualification is Elve’s reported milestone, supported by U.S. Space Force Small Business Innovation Research funding; the company has not yet shown the amplifier operating on an orbital mission in the account published by SpaceNews. Elve’s hardware is therefore moving toward flight use, but remains short of deployment.