“It’s a huge project and a fantastic feather in the hat of everyone on our team who worked on it,” G2V Optics CEO Ryan Tucker told Taproot. “And I think it’s great for Edmonton and our technology.” G2V Optics has received $ 822,100 in contracts from NASA since 2021. This project, the culmination of a two-year procurement process, involves testing OSAM-1, a spacecraft scheduled to be launched in 2026 to serve Landsat 7, a satellite that has passed its heyday. If OSAM-1 can successfully dock and refuel Landsat 7, then NASA will be one step closer to increasing the life expectancy of satellites, even those not designed to be in orbit, and reduce the number of outsiders you assign the ship that is in danger of crashing into each other all over our planet. This is not the first G2V Optics space invasion. In addition to a previous contract with NASA laboratories, the company is partnering with the Center nationale d’études spatiales (CNES) in France to allow testing of the technology involved in the 2024 Martian Moons eExploration (MMX) mission, in which a rover will land in Phobos and fly next to Deimos. “We put nothing into space. But we create all the photons to make sure everything works when they send them there,” Tucker said, noting that it is fun to have a preview of the ongoing space exploration. “Somehow we look behind the curtain on these really interesting and exciting space exploration missions before they go public.” Space is not where G2V Optics started when it was founded in 2015. After founder and CTO Michael Taschuk first developed the company’s light emitting diode technology at the National Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Alberta, its first applications tended to be in food production, especially to maximize the efficiency of vertical agriculture. “Technically, (we did) remarkable things,” Tucker said. “We were able to grow 30% more biomass with the same amount of energy and improve what was possible using the complexity of our technology. But we realized we were too early for this market … it is such a budding industry that deals with its own challenges around escalation “. At the same time, solar cell researchers and aerospace companies were ready for what G2V is doing. “Suddenly we started working in this area, with this more complex requirement, which fit perfectly with what we had developed,” Tucker said. “This is the attraction you are looking for, right? Your job as a startup is to find what fits. And it was not exactly where we thought it was. But we were, I like to think, smart enough to hear it and chase it when we found”.
