The Reliability Backbone
of Micropropulsion

The Electrospray
Lab in a Box

Bipolar ±0.5–6 kV. Programmable polarity alternation.Flipping the voltage polarity on a schedule. Without it the propellant slowly destroys the emitter through electrochemistry. Supplies can do this; keeping the measurement accurate across every reversal, for a thousand hours, is the hard part. Floating HV-side sensing at 1 nA. Neutralizer channelA thruster shooting out ions would charge the satellite until it stops working. The neutralizer sprays electrons back out to keep it electrically balanced., arc countingCounting micro-sparks. A rising arc rate is the earliest warning that a thruster is starting to fail., Python API. The measurement layer ships first and retrofits into the high-voltage supply your lab already owns. Integrated instrument €18–35k.

The problem, in print: TU Dresden + MIT run electrospray tests on rack supplies with a self-built DAQ board — and attribute the residual measurement error to the supply itself (J. Electric Propulsion, 2025); the Royal Military College of Canada reports two EMCO supplies switched at 0.333 Hz under LabVIEW (J. Electric Propulsion, 2024).

Own the
1,000-Hour Wall

Mission-driven lifetime requirements for this class sit at 1,000+ hours; ION-X's programme milestones with CNES today are 10 h and 100 h; the longest continuous run of an ionic-liquid electrospray thruster announced in Europe is 400 h. Every rung of that ladder is chamber time somebody has to buy. Our automated vacuum chambers run your thruster around the clock — your thruster, our chamber, your live data feed.

The Industry's
Health Record

Every bench and every campaign feeds a cross-thruster library of degradation signatures — overspray onsetWhen a thruster starts spraying propellant onto its own extractor grid instead of out the back. It is the number-one killer of electrospray thrusters — and it is visible in the current trace long before it is fatal., clogging tracesThe microscopic channels that feed propellant to the emitters slowly block up. The flow signature changes in a way you can measure., arc clusteringSparks stop being random and start grouping together — a statistical tell that failure is approaching.. Hardware gets copied. A dataset only accumulates. Anomaly alerts and remaining-life estimates, as a subscription.

MycoThruster

A self-healing electrospray. Mycelium-inspired feed in independently-plumbed zones — per-zone telemetry throttles a degrading zone before it poisons the extractor, and the network reroutes around damage. The industry flies open-loop. We already sell the loop.