How Singapore Gatecrashed The Space Race

Singapore is 744 square kilometres of very expensive real estate with one of the world’s busiest airports sitting on top of it. When it comes to aerospace, there’s no launch site and an airspace so tightly managed that flying a hobby drone requires paperwork. On paper, it may be the last place you would build an aerospace industry.

But if you look a little closer, you’ll see that the island has an advantage money can’t buy. It’s located almost exactly on the equator, so most satellites pass overhead at least once a day. Now if you stack that on top of decades of precision engineering and aircraft maintenance, it starts to make a little more sense.

The numbers tend to agree. Roughly 70 space companies now call the island home that employ about 2,000 people, with over 30 satellites launched over the past two decades. While they’re not trying to out-SpaceX SpaceX, they are certainly carving out their own opportunities in the market.

Singapore’s Swift Shift To A Space Programme

Things began to change in 2022 when the national space office, OSTIn, launched the Space Technology Development Programme, writing cheques of over S$200 million to date.

On 1 April of this year, OSTIn was folded into the new National Space Agency of Singapore, which was announced two months earlier at the country’s first Space Summit.

NSAS arrived with a wider remit – operating national space capabilities and writing the space legislation that previously didn’t exist. The message to startup founders was perfectly clear. This was a sector now, not a side project.

Meet Singapore’s Top Aerospace Startups To Watch

The global space economy is expected to hit US$1.8 trillion by 2035 – and Singapore definitely wants a slice of that pie. Here are six of the country’s aerospace startups building a name for themselves.

1. ALIENA

ALIENA makes Hall-effect thrusters – the plasma engines that let satellites steer, but miniaturised. A conventional one eats through kilowatts but ALIENA’s MUSIC runs on under 10 watts. This matters enormously when you’ve got a tiny satellite with nowhere for solar panels.

In April 2024, the company closed a US$5.6 million Series A led by Wavemaker Partners. It pushed cumulative backing past US$9.3 million and funded a much bigger test facility. A custom MUSIC is currently earmarked for ELITE, Singapore’s flagship very-low Earth-orbit imaging satellite.

2. SpeQtral

SpeQtral’s pitch is straightforward, and mildly terrifying. Quantum computers will eventually shred today’s encryption but the fix is distributing keys as photons, where physics guarantees that any interception gets noticed.

Founded in 2017, the startup has raised US$8.3 million led by Xora Innovation, after a US$1.9 million seed. A huge milestone landed on 28 November 2025 when SpeQtre, roughly the size of a microwave, built with the UK’s RAL Space and backed £7 million of British government funding, deployed from SpaceX’s Transporter-15.

3. Equatorial Space

Most rockets are, functionally, a carefully controlled explosion. Equatorial Space’s are not. The startup builds hybrid motors burning chilled nitrous oxide against a proprietary solid fuel. The two can’t mix by accident, so the rocket ships fully inert with no pyrotechnics.

In December 2020, it flew a demonstrator to 1,200 metres from a palm oil estate in Perak which happened to be the first commercially developed hybrid rocket launch in Southeast Asia.

Equatorial Space raised US$1.5 million in seed in March 2023 and another US$1.5 million pre-Series A a year later.

4. NuSpace

Mobile coverage tends to stop at the coastline. NuSpace’s answer is a constellation of shoebox-sized satellites running LoRaWAN, so a buoy or shipping container can beam data straight up with no ground infrastructure needed.

The company’s first commercial satellite, NuLIoN, went up in July 2023. By December, the team had pulled off a first with Squareroot8, a post-quantum key exchange between satellite and ground, using an onboard quantum random number generator.

5. F-drones

Hundreds of ships anchor off Singapore, waiting on spare parts, paperwork and provisions that are delivered by small boats. Not only is it slow and pricey, it’s startlingly carbon-heavy. A 10km boat run emits over 100kg of CO2, but F-drones can do the same for under 500 grams.

It was the first company to run commercial beyond-visual-line-of-sight deliveries to vessels around the clock, including the world’s first night-time drone delivery to a ship in November 2020.

While the current fleet handles 5-10kg, the HyperLaunch Heavy, still in development, is built for 100kg over 100km.

6. FlyORO

Sustainable aviation fuel has always had a bit of a plumbing problem. It arrives pre-blended at fixed ratios in bulk so an operator wanting a specific SAF percentage on one flight is fresh out of luck. FlyORO’s AlphaLite is a 40-foot modular blending unit that plugs into existing airport fuel infrastructure and mixes to order.

In January 2024, the startup raised US$1.6 million pre-Series A led by Audacy Ventures with Investible. A year later, they deployed with Wagner Sustainable Fuels and Boeing at Toowoomba Wellcamp Airport in Queensland.

By May of this year, FlyORO had blended over 500,000 litres.