Stara Space

Stara Space is a U.S. space-infrastructure startup founded in 2018, with roots as a stealth-mode operation from late 2018, headquartered across offices in Vancouver, WA, Manhattan Beach, CA, and Miami Beach, FL. The company emerged at a moment when falling launch costs and miniaturized electronics made satellite deployment newly affordable for private companies, while operating a constellation once in orbit remained out of reach for most smaller players due to a lack of shared ground and relay infrastructure.

Stara's core focus is providing space infrastructure as a service: a network of small, low-cost satellites that let other satellite operators relay data in near real time, run compute workloads directly in space, and store data at scale across the constellation, delivered as an affordable subscription rather than requiring customers to build and operate their own ground and relay networks.

The company's first flight products were the NOOR-1A and NOOR-1B picosatellites, built on Alba Orbital's Unicorn-2 PocketQube platform and purchased in a deal announced in January 2019 — the first commercial sale of the Unicorn-2 bus. NOOR-1A/1B launched in December 2019 aboard a Rocket Lab Electron mission, demonstrating low-Earth-orbit intersatellite links, encrypted communications, and ground software integration enabling third-party satellites to request data transfer.