This Satellite Will Literally Breathe Air to Stay in Orbit
A new type of propulsion system could allow satellites to fly closer to Earth than ever before without being dragged down by the planet’s atmosphere. Spanish startup Kreios Space developed an air-breathing electric propulsion system that collects residual gases from the atmosphere, like oxygen and nitrogen, and uses them as propellant for a satellite’s thrusters. Breathe in, breathe out Satellites flying in very low Earth orbit face severe atmospheric drag, rapidly decaying their orbit and pulling them down to a fiery death.
- ▪A new type of propulsion system could allow satellites to fly closer to Earth than ever before without being dragged down by the planet’s atmosphere.
- ▪Spanish startup Kreios Space developed an air-breathing electric propulsion system that collects residual gases from the atmosphere, like oxygen and nitrogen, and uses them as propellant for a satellite’s thrusters.
- ▪Breathe in, breathe out Satellites flying in very low Earth orbit face severe atmospheric drag, rapidly decaying their orbit and pulling them down to a fiery death.
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| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/this-satellite-will-literally-breathe-air-to-stay-in-orbit-2000796713 |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:10:41 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T13:15:48.076Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T13:15:48.076Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TfWUC9NfbEoX · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A new type of propulsion system could allow satellites to fly closer to Earth than ever before without being dragged down by the planet’s atmosphere. Spanish startup Kreios Space developed an air-breathing electric propulsion system that collects residual gases from the atmosphere, like oxygen and nitrogen, and uses them as propellant for a satellite’s thrusters. The new technology would allow satellites to stay in very low Earth orbit (VLEO), circling our planet at roughly 60 miles to 250 miles (100 to 400 kilometers) above the…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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