Orbital Arcs purpose is to invent the technology that enables human civilization to spread throughout the solar system.  We’re starting with in-space propulsion.

Our first product is a new variety of ion thruster using a patent-pending ionization technology that produces ions with much less wasted power than plasma based systems such as Hall Effect and gridded ion thrusters, and operates with a smaller emitter at much higher ion current density. Our ionization method is also so gentle that it typically will not break molecular bonds, allowing our thruster to use molecular fuels that match or exceed the performance of xenon at less than 1% of the cost  

Combined these features result in a flexible, scalable, modular thruster that fits on a cubesat but can push like the main propulsion of a major NASA interplanetary mission. It is smaller, lighter, more power efficient and much cheaper to operate than any comparably powerful electric propulsion system we are aware of.

We are still early in development, but if we succeed then this technology unlocks the economics for major physical industry in space.  Space today is mostly a data layer because the cost of delta-v makes moving good around in orbit prohibitively expensive.  We need to reduce $/m/s/payload kg. The metric is technical, but the goal is simple:

Make propulsion cheaper, so we can do more things in space.