Cascade Space

Cascade Space is a space communication systems company founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco. It develops tools and infrastructure for designing, building, testing and operating spacecraft communication systems, positioning itself as a commercial alternative to NASA's Deep Space Network, which the company describes as oversubscribed and unavailable for commercial missions. Its stated goal is to let customers ship faster with smaller teams.

The company has two main product lines. Cascade Designer is a browser-based tool for link budget design and simulation, with a drag-and-drop editor, a library of generic RF components and a catalog of commercially available parts from suppliers such as Plane Wave and Orbital Systems, support for vendor-supplied or user-uploaded 3D antenna patterns, CCSDS demodulator blocks computing C/N0, Eb/N0 and margin, team sharing with read-only or edit access, and an API for batch analysis of full mission trajectories from a trajectory CSV. Designer is built on spacelink, the company's open-source Python library for space communications modeling. The second line, Cascade Array, is ground infrastructure: rather than single large dishes, the company plans arrays of smaller dishes, which it argues are cheaper to build, more reliable and offer dynamic aperture size and pricing with build costs that fall over time.

On the infrastructure roadmap, the company states that its first ground station, Earth Station Zero, will be online and downlinking data from the Moon in 2026, with plans to scale to a global network by 2028; its website also advertises new capacity coming online in 2027.