Earth and lunar orbit just like home for Broad Reach

8th Continent Project Founding Sponsor Profiles

Though “Broad Reach” is a nautical term, 8th Continent Project founding sponsor Broad Reach Engineering prides itself on its wide range of talents, agility and ability to develop new products specifically for unique spaceflight missions.

What this means, Christian Lenz said, is that “Broad Reach looks at available technology and sees areas of cross-pollination that lead to new capabilities and opportunities for near future missions.”

Broad Reach Engineering, with offices in Colorado and Arizona, develops hardware and software for spaceflight missions. Products include spacecraft avionics, science payload electronics, spacecraft flight software, dual and triple frequency GPS receivers for high precision orbit determination (POD) and occultation science, as well as mission design services.

“We provide high-end and cost-effective products to the aerospace industry,” Lenz stated. “In the space industry, quite frankly, companies generally develop a set of products for one mission and then do not improve them, sometimes for decades, so what is flown today was often developed in the 1980s or earlier. That’s neither sustainable nor does it serve the end user.”

Broad Reach Engineering believes in a first principles and clean sheet approach in order to get to a no-nonsense engineering approach to providing solutions that best fit to make the mission successful.  Generally this will entail higher integration, increase performance, and often, at the systems level, the improvements are “free” compared to what might be considered as older “heritage solutions.” What this translates to is more than 12 years of proven success developing and delivering engineering and flight hardware and software to clients.

According to Lenz, Broad Reach Engineering is a private, mostly employee-owned business that has shown steady growth since its founding in 1997. To date, more than 14 of Broad Reach’s systems are in orbit and another three are in final stages of integration and test. This includes five fully executed Technical Assistance Agreements, required under the International Traffic and Arms Regulations (ITAR) with countries in every continent except Antarctica and Africa.

In 2005 the company launched its first Integrated Avionics Unit (IAU) onboard the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) XSS-11 mission. As a supplier to Lockheed Martin, Broad Reach supplied the spacecraft core avionics for this important mission. In the spring of 2006 the company then launched Dual Frequency GPS radio occultation and Precision Orbit Determination receivers onboard the six COSMIC spacecraft. Based on the licensed BlackJack design by JPL, these GPS receivers have been providing key atmospheric data to the science, weather forecasting and climate monitoring communities.

“Our data has been of such high quality that many weather centers around the globe have started using this information operationally,” Lenz explained.

Broad Reach hardware is also proven On-Orbit in LEO and GEO and now also in lunar orbit.

“We are always pushing the envelope, bringing space technology to a place that moves that needle,” he added. “Our goal is to be a part of the movement that is Space 2.0, part of entrepreneurial ventures – like the 8th Continent Project – that are able to reach across boundaries and provide the innovation needed to broaden our world and our experiences.”