Beyond Reach Labs Is Betting the Future of Space Runs on How Well Things Fold

There is a quiet ceiling above the satellite industry, and almost nobody outside of it talks about the shape of it. A spacecraft can carry a stiffer solar array, which means a heavier one, or it can carry a shorter one, which means less power. For decades those were the two doors. Beyond Reach Labs, a Y Combinator Winter 2026 company working out of a building in Brooklyn, was started on the premise that there is a third door, and that the whole thing turns on one unglamorous engineering question: how do you fold something enormous small enough to fit in a rocket, then unfold it again without tearing it apart?

The company builds deployable solar arrays that compress to roughly the footprint of a dining table for launch and expand to the size of a football field once they reach orbit. The pitch is that this delivers about ten times more usable power per launch without adding mass or volume. That number is the entire business. Everything else - the patents, the letters of intent, the 2027 flight demonstration - hangs off the idea that the bottleneck in space power is not the panel, but the packing.

Section 01The problem is a curve going almost straight up

To understand why anyone would spend years on the geometry of unfolding, look at the demand side. Power consumption in orbit sits at roughly 20 megawatts today. By 2030, projections used by the company put it above 10 gigawatts - a jump of about 500 times in less than five years. The drivers are the things that have crowded into every space investor deck lately: orbital compute and AI inference, high-resolution remote sensing, commercial stations, and lunar operations. If those markets arrive on anything like the timeline people expect, humanity may need more electrical power in space over the next handful of years than it has generated there in the previous seventy combined.

20MW

Today
~2026

~2GW

Mid-
decade

10GW+

Projected
2030

Existing arrays cannot ride that curve. They were designed for satellites measured in kilowatts, and they scale badly: to get more power you add area, and to add area you either add supporting structure and mass or you accept a floppier, less reliable panel. The launch fairing - the nose cone that has to physically contain the folded array - becomes the hard limit. This is the wall Beyond Reach Labs is trying to walk through.

Section 02What they actually built

The core technology has two names that sound like they came out of a NASA grant, because they did. The first is the Pop-Up Extending Truss, or PETS. The second is HERDS - Hierarchical High-Expansion Ratio Deployable Structures. Both are scissor-based truss architectures, the same mechanical family as the folding gate or the expanding wine rack, engineered to a very different tolerance. They compress tightly for launch and then extend through centripetal deployment in microgravity: the structure is coaxed open partly by spinning, and it locks into a stiff, load-bearing shape once fully extended.

Stowed
(launch)

→

Deploying
(spin)

→

Extended
(in orbit)

The elegant part is that the difficulty is inverted from where a layperson would guess. Making a solar cell more efficient is a well-trodden materials problem worked on by large companies. Making a very large structure that survives a violent rocket ride while folded, then reliably opens to hundreds of times its stowed volume and stays rigid, is a mechanisms-and-materials problem that very few people have spent a career on. Beyond Reach Labs' bet is that the second problem is the more valuable one to own.

It is also a problem with almost no room for a second try. A software company ships, measures, and patches. A deployable structure gets exactly one chance to open correctly, tens of thousands of kilometers from the nearest technician, after a launch that shakes it harder than anything it will experience again. Every hinge, every joint, every fold has to behave the first time. That intolerance for iteration is precisely what makes the mechanism valuable once it works - and why the founders talk so much about failure as a design tool. You learn where a structure breaks on the test stand and on zero-gravity flights, so that it does not break where no one can reach it. The same technology, the company notes, extends beyond arrays: deployable thermal radiators use the same folding logic to shed heat in orbit.

Section 03The two people behind it

The company was co-founded by Mitchell Fogelson and Pele Collins, who met as mechanical engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania starting in 2013. They come at the same problem from opposite ends of the space industry. Fogelson, the CEO, did a PhD at Carnegie Mellon on the design, optimization, and simulation of large deployable space structures, in collaboration with NASA, and is credited as the inventor of the company's core technology. Through a NASA NIAC grant, he and his collaborators worked specifically on deploying kilometer-scale structures from a single launch - the research line that became PETS and HERDS. He has tested deployable trusses on zero-gravity flights.

"Uncovering what won't work is often as valuable as knowing what will."Mitchell Fogelson, CEO & Co-Founder

Collins, the CTO, spent roughly seven years at SpaceX leading Dragon parachute engineering across dozens of missions, and did a stint at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Parachutes are an instructive background for this company: they are, after all, large fabric-and-line structures that have to pack into almost nothing and then deploy perfectly, once, under enormous stress, with lives or payloads riding on the outcome. It is deployment engineering by another name. The rest of the early team is dense with SpaceX alumni - a head of engineering with more than a decade there, additional founding engineers - which is the kind of hiring that signals the founders understand this is a hardware-execution problem, not a slide-deck one.

Section 04Who buys this, and how the money works

The customers are the operators building the power-hungry future: satellite operators, commercial space station builders, orbital data center companies, and planners of deep-space and lunar missions. The business model is contract-based capital equipment - Beyond Reach Labs sells the deployable arrays and structures rather than the electricity. As of its YC batch, the company reported more than $175 million in letters of intent, a figure worth reading with the usual caution attached to any pre-revenue commitment. An LOI is a demand signal, not a bank deposit. It says the market wants this to exist; it does not say the hardware works yet.

That last point is the honest center of the story. Beyond Reach Labs is, for now, a pre-revenue company with impressive credentials and a hard gate in front of it. Until an array successfully unfolds and holds its shape in orbit, everything remains a very well-argued promise. The 2027 flight demonstration is that gate. It is the moment the third door either opens or does not.

Section 05The competitive shape of it

The incumbents in space structures and arrays are large and capable - Redwire, Airbus, Northrop Grumman, and Rocket Lab through its solar heritage. What Beyond Reach Labs argues is that none of them are building for the specific regime it is targeting: kilometer-scale, single-launch deployment at a high expansion ratio. The competitive theory is a classic one for a hardware startup. Pick the constraint the big players have designed around rather than solved, own the intellectual property on the mechanism, and get flight-qualified hardware up before anyone else treats the niche as a real market.

Approach	Get more power by...	The catch
Build stiffer	Adding structure	More mass, more launch cost
Build shorter	Accepting a smaller array	Less power
Beyond Reach Labs	High-expansion-ratio folding	Must prove deployment in orbit

There is something worth stealing in the framing, even for founders nowhere near aerospace. Beyond Reach Labs did not start with a market and reverse-engineer a product. It started with a stubborn research question about kilometer-scale structures, funded by a grant, and the company arrived second, once the physics looked like it might hold. The moat is in the constraint everyone else routed around. If you want a portable lesson from a space company, that is it: the least glamorous part of the stack, the part people assume is solved, is sometimes where the whole business is hiding.

Section 06Where it fits

Positioned plainly, Beyond Reach Labs wants to be power infrastructure for orbit - the extension cord for a generation of hardware that everyone is planning and nobody has powered. The tagline the company uses for itself is unfussy: solar infrastructure for orbital power. Its mission statement is to deliver orders-of-magnitude more power per launch and bring scalable energy to the places in space that need it most. Whether it earns that role depends on a single unfolding, somewhere above the atmosphere, in 2027. It is a lot to hang on a fold. But then, so is a parachute, and one of the founders spent seven years proving those open every time.