Cascade Space

Cascade Space is a space communication systems company based in San Francisco, founded in 2025. It is developing an end-to-end platform covering the design, test and operation of spacecraft communication systems, together with ground-station infrastructure intended as a commercial alternative to NASA's Deep Space Network, which the company describes as oversubscribed and unavailable for commercial missions. Rather than single large dishes, Cascade uses arrays of smaller dishes, which it argues are cheaper to build, more reliable, offer dynamic aperture size and pricing, and have build costs that decline over time.

On the infrastructure side, the company states that new capacity will come online in 2027; its Y Combinator profile describes a first ground station, Earth Station Zero, expected to be online and downlinking data from the Moon in 2026, scaling to a global network by 2028. On the software side, Cascade Designer is a browser-based tool for designing and simulating communication links: a drag-and-drop editor with a library of generic RF components and vendor catalog parts (for example from Plane Wave and Orbital Systems), 3D antenna pattern lookup, blocks for transmitters, attenuators, gain, free-space path loss and CCSDS demodulators computing C/N0, Eb/N0 and margin, plus team sharing with read-only or edit access and an API for batch analysis of full mission trajectories from a CSV upload. Designer is built on spacelink, the company's open-source Python library for space communications analysis, which also underpins the Cascade Portal implementation. A separate "Array" product line is presented for operating spacecraft.

Founding story

Cascade Space was founded in 2025 by Jacob Portukalian, who had architected communications systems at SpaceX, Tyvak and Astra, together with co-founder and CTO Arlen Abraham, a generalist across hardware, software/firmware, product and business with experience in aerospace, consumer goods, communications and energy. The founders assembled a team of space engineers, including veterans of SpaceX and Astra, to address what they describe as a bottleneck in communication system design, test and operations for lunar and deep space missions.

Business model

Cascade Space sells communication system design software (Cascade Designer / Cascade Portal) alongside ground-station capacity, with per-configuration pricing shown for Cascade Array modes and bands inside the design tool. Access to the design tool is offered via scheduled demos and reservations, and includes team seats and API usage.

Software for communication system design plus ground-station service capacity, with configuration-based pricing displayed for Cascade Array modes and bands.

Traction

Team of seven as of the Y Combinator listing, with a Senior Mechanical Engineer role open in San Francisco. The company released the spacelink Python library as open source and launched Cascade Designer following an earlier launch of deep space communications as a service. First ground station, Earth Station Zero, is targeted for lunar downlink in 2026, with new capacity stated for 2027 and a global network planned by 2028.

Latest developments

In July 2025 the company announced a $5.9 million seed round from a broad investor group to accelerate development of the Cascade Portal, and stated it had recently open-sourced the spacelink Python library. It subsequently launched Cascade Designer, its link design and simulation product.