FEATURE/Houston, we have a solution: Taiwan space startup adjusts satellite attitudes

By Pan Tzu-yu and James Lo, CNA staff reporter and writer

It is 2004, and a couple of giant globes roll past a fatigued Will Smith in a self-driving car in the Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi film "I, Robot."

Smith's character, Detective Del Spooner of the Chicago PD in 2035, soon finds himself boxed in by two massive semis, which seamlessly turn 90 degrees at high speed -- thanks to their giant spherical wheels -- before releasing an army of advanced robots that attack him.

Inspired by the maneuverability made possible by the giant globes -- wheels that rotate 360 degrees -- in the movie, Taiwanese engineering prodigy and tech entrepreneur Thomas Yen (顏伯勳) turned fiction into reality.

"There were these futuristic cars with ball-shaped wheels that I thought were really cool," recalled the 25-year-old Yen, adding that the image had a huge impact on him when he was just 16.

However, instead of applying the science to vehicle engineering, Yen founded Tensor Tech in 2019 to specialize in satellite attitude solutions in space by adopting spherical motors inspired by the wheels from Smith's 2004 action flick.

Passionate attitude

From a young age he always knew where his passion lay, says Yen from Chiayi City.

However, Taiwan's education system was deemed too rigid for what he wanted to accomplish, he added. As a result, his family applied to have him homeschooled for high school, enabling him to concentrate on engineering.

It was during these formative years that the early concept of his company's flagship product took shape.

Yen said that through the support of a tech personnel cultivation project initiated by the Ministry of Education, he and a friend were given permission in high school to use the Department of Electrical Engineering lab at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) as part of their education.

As NCKU works with the Taiwan Space Agency, both teenagers were introduced to single-axis motors, commonly used in space technology to control the attitude of satellites.

In satellite terminology, attitude defines the orientation of a hardware, describing where it is pointing in relation to a center such as the Earth or the Sun.

Yen's engineering brain soon started to think of ways to replace single-axis motors in satellites with spherical ones by making one of his favorite fictional techs a reality for a different application.

"Engineers enjoy challenges and creating new objects," Yen said. "And that was how I got started."

Eventually, Yen's engineering talent got him accepted into the Department of Electrical Engineering at Taiwan's top university, National Taiwan University.

However, with the vision of putting spherical motors into space still on his mind, Yen dropped out of school and started his own company in 2019.

"We started with this project (spherical motors)," Yen said. "next thing we know, we've been at it nearly nine years."

1 is better than 3

The entrepreneur explained that while spherical motor technology existed more than 20 years ago it was limited to the academic world.

His New Taipei-based company became the first startup to engineer the motors for commercial use in space satellites.

Based on the dimensional possibilities of a ball, a spherical motor is a piece of machinery that enables hardware to adjust its attitude around multiple axes.

When adopted in space tech, a singular spherical motor allows a satellite to smoothly adjust its attitude towards Earth in various directions in outer space where there is no gravity.

Conversely, single-axis motors that are adopted by most traditional satellites today require three motors to be installed in one unit to rotate hardware in space based on the principle of the three-dimensional XYZ axes.

According to Yen, not only do spherical motors allow for better and smoother maneuverability of a satellite, they also drastically cut costs.

In addition to providing satellites with spherical attitude, the single unit also allows for better electricity allocation as hardware only has to focus on one motor rather than three, facilitating the redirection of power to other parts of a satellite.

However, the most alluring aspect of a singular motor from a customer's perspective is financial as it lightens the weight of the payload.

Yen said customers often have to pay over NT$1 million (US$34,000) per kilogram to rocket companies such as Elon Musk's SpaceX for any payload sent into space.

This means that Tensor Tech customers can save NT$1 million for every kilo in weight eliminated, he said.

X marks the sweet spot

Tensor Tech's customer base now spans Europe, the United States, Japan, South Korea and India, according to Yen, and SpaceX carries the satellites of his clients into outer space every season.

The achievement was credited to the Taiwanese startup's maiden flight with SpaceX in January 2022. The company's innovative spherical motor ran until the satellite became disconnected one year later.

"Our product has been to space -- that's a benchmark," Yen told CNA. After reaching that benchmark, Tensor Tech was on the radar of companies around the world that had satellites they wanted above the atmosphere.

As the client list grew, so did the company's products and list of services, Yen said.

Yen went on to reveal that the company has found its commercial "sweet spot" with SpaceX. "Our company's products are on every mission," he said.

Pursuing engineering excellence

Although the company only made spherical motors for small satellites when it was first founded, it gradually created complimentary control systems to pair with the motors.

To date, the company's clientele has encouraged it to advance its engineering and develop spherical motors as small as a tennis ball for nanosatellites.

Yen said that from his perspective, the most valuable asset the company possesses is the power of its engineering.

As such, Tensor Tech aims to advance products such as large-scale spherical motors that can be used to adjust the attitude of big satellites, he said.

According to Yen, in the weightless environment of space, satellites cannot rely on external forces to maneuver, meaning they rely solely on internal motors to change direction.

Although the miniature and enlarged versions of the spherical motor are made of the same materials, the larger version endures greater structural stress, he explained, adding that every component must be optimized accordingly -- this is a key area the company is actively focusing on.

While Tensor Tech's growing popularity allowed it to break even financially this year, with incoming profitability the company plans to invest more in product and technical development, Yen said.

The entrepreneur and engineering prodigy, born in 2000, expressed hope that his company will continue to uphold engineering excellence as its core value.

Enditem/AW