Final Proximity Space Systems

About us

The last hundred metres,
made Routine.

Guidance, navigation and control for the part of a mission where the margins are smallest and there is no second attempt.

T minus 00:06:00   WHO WE ARE

About us

Final Proximity Space Systems builds real-time, onboard autonomy for the closing phase of a mission. Our guidance, navigation and control software flies spacecraft against targets that tumble, that were never designed to be approached, and that may manoeuvre while being approached. It also flies them onto surfaces where the vehicle gets one attempt.

The work spans five areas. Terminal approach and capture in orbit. Operations against uncooperative and manoeuvring objects. Sequencing and transfer design for multi-target servicing and debris removal. Spacecraft whose structural modes and propellant slosh cannot be treated as disturbances. And autonomous powered descent to the lunar surface.

What connects them is one requirement: constraints must hold under uncertainty, not merely at a nominal point. Model error, sensor noise, an uncertain fill fraction, a target that moves when it should not. A controller that satisfies its constraints only on the nominal trajectory has not solved the problem, and in this phase of flight the difference is the vehicle.

We would like to work with everyone who is serious about space.

T minus 00:05:30   MISSION

Our mission

To make close-proximity flight something a spacecraft can be trusted to do on its own.

We develop guidance, navigation and control that keeps its guarantees when the world does not match the model. The methods are model predictive control, convex and mixed-integer optimisation, and reachability analysis, solved in real time and exercised against flight-representative hardware rather than only in simulation.

Fuel, robustness and safety are not competing objectives to be balanced after the fact. They are constraints in the problem we solve, which is why the solutions hold.

T minus 00:05:00   VISION

Our vision

A space environment that stays usable.

Satellites that can be refuelled, repaired and repositioned instead of abandoned in place. Debris that can be approached and removed instead of tracked and avoided for decades. Landings that succeed on the first attempt because the guidance was certified to, not because the margins happened to be generous.

Each of those depends on a spacecraft doing something difficult without waiting on a ground loop. Autonomy is what makes them affordable at any scale worth having, and it is the whole of our work.

T minus 00:04:30   NEXT

What we build

Five capability areas, each with the method behind it and a figure of what it does.

See the capabilities