Co-founder of Future Ventures and DFJ, supporting passionate founders to forge a better future. Early VC investor in Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, Commonwealth Fusion.
A fantastic new addition to the space museum at work: the first GPS payload from Xona 🛰
You can see a standard L-band antenna array in the outer ring of 12 squares and the next-gen C-band array in the inner circle of 5. Xona is building a constellation of GPS sats in LEO to 100x the power and resiliency of existing GPS systems, even enabling it to work indoors.
Xona’s first demo sats were named Huginn and Muninn after the two ravens of the Norse god Odin (meaning "thought" and "memory"). Muninn would have been the second to fly, but they learned all they needed to learn from Huginn… and so I have the flight version to save for posterity.
Xona has built their next gen Pulsar satellites in house, and I signed the first one (which will launch with SpaceX in October). The wall art shows a 1:1 scale of Pulsar with the solar panel wings unfolded. A constellation of 258 of these satellites costs less than one legacy GPS sat today.