A Harwell-based company that runs a small satellite network so that tiny low-power sensors anywhere on Earth can send data to space without a mobile signal.
Lacuna Space connects the places that phones cannot reach. Many sensors, such as a water-quality probe in a river, a gauge on a borehole, or a tag on a farm or a forest, run on tiny batteries and sit far from any mobile mast. Lacuna's satellites listen for the low-power LoRa radio signals that these devices send, so the sensor can talk to a satellite directly with no special equipment. The company calls this direct-to-device connectivity. Its satellites carry its own LoneWhisper payload, and it plans a constellation of up to 32 satellites in orbits about 500 km above the Earth.
The company started at the European Space Agency's business incubator in the UK at Harwell in 2017, and the first test satellite launched on 1 April 2019. Since then it has launched several more, including four launched in November 2025 on a Falcon 9. Its current campaign is called Call of the Wild. We could not find the names of its founders on the pages we read. Chief executive Rob Spurrett said of the latest mission: "From pilot projects to operational scale, this mission marks a turning point." We found no formal mission statement.
Lacuna's UK home is Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire, and it is now a tenant at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory within the Harwell Space Cluster. UK-based partners include the UK Space Agency, which supported it, and Oxford Space Systems, whose deployable helical antenna flew on its satellites. Open Cosmos is mentioned in connection with its early prototypes. In December 2023 Spire Global was awarded a contract to build and operate six satellites for Lacuna.
The purpose of the network is practical. Customers named in the pages we read include groups measuring water quality and salinity in rivers, wells and boreholes, and monitoring agricultural run-off. A partner in South East Asia uses its sensors to monitor wetlands. That gives the work a clear environmental focus, which the company's partners and the UK Space Agency chief executive, Dr Paul Bate, have praised as a "prime example of UK innovation in satellite communications". The sources give no detail on team size or culture.
People in this kind of business include radio and satellite engineers who design the payloads, software engineers who handle the stream of data coming down from space, mission and operations specialists, and partnership managers who work with sensor makers and customers around the world. Physics, electronics, computing and geography all lead here. With its base in Oxfordshire, it sits next to a cluster of other space companies, which makes it easier to move between them.
Website: lacuna.space
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