Cyclops Space
Space is about to compute at scale — and generate more data than radio can ever carry down. Cyclops flies optical relays above the clouds: fibre-grade laser links between orbit and Earth that don't break when the weather does.
01 — The ceiling
A single radio downlink tops out around here — and the network saturates as constellations grow. Meanwhile, the data being generated in orbit is heading for the opposite direction.
Radio frequencies punch through any weather — but they're spectrum-starved. Practical downlinks cap near 1–2 Gbps and crowd each other out.
Space compute is going ubiquitous. Earth-observation, AI inference and storage in orbit will need to move data up and down by the terabit.
Lasers carry 1,000× more — optical links already exceed 10 Gbps and reach into the Tbps range. But there's a catch in the last few kilometres.
02 — Demonstration
Optical beams can't punch through cloud — attenuation hits ~50 dB/km, and the link simply dies. Even clear air loses signal to vapour and dust. Change the weather below and watch what happens to each architecture.
The relay sits in the stratosphere, above the cloud deck — so its line-of-sight to orbit is never blocked. The link to the ground runs down a fibre tether, immune to weather.
03 — What clear air unlocks
more throughput over an unobstructed optical path
Industry optical links already demonstrate 0.94 Tbps over a 53 km free-space channel — and reach Tbps-class with only a handful of stations. Cyclops brings that capacity to the ground, in any weather.
04 — Stay close to the user
Today's fix for bad weather is site diversity — many ground stations spread across the map, hoping one has clear sky. When your local station clouds over, traffic reroutes to a distant city and crawls home over the backhaul. Cyclops keeps the link overhead, always.
Stations blanket the map — but your nearest one clouds over. The satellite must downlink to a clear-sky station 1,900 km away, then haul the data home over land.
The relay floats above the weather, directly overhead. The satellite hands off to the balloon, which drops straight down to your local station — no cross-country detour.
05 — The architecture
Cyclops puts an optical transceiver where the air is always clear — then runs the data home down a tether instead of through the storm.
A LEO satellite carries an optical terminal, beaming data down by laser instead of radio.
A high-altitude helium balloon floats in the stratosphere — above every cloud — with a laser transmitter and receiver.
A fibre-optic cable woven with a carbon-nanotube tether carries the signal down — and holds the relay in place.
Data arrives at your facility at fibre speed, with a clean optical path to orbit maintained 24/7.
06 — Why it wins
Cyclops runs on intentional, purpose-built links — sized to demand instead of a sprawl of ground stations. That lowers CapEx, removes the downtime inclement weather forces on terrestrial sites, and holds latency variance flat. Your orbital data centre is only as useful as the uptime of its link.
The team
Cyclops Space is built by a founding team obsessed with the physics of getting data from orbit to the ground. Meet the people behind the relay.