AeroAstro's past spacecraft programs include the following:

ALEXIS

AeroAstro's first spacecraft, ALEXIS, was built for Los Alamos National Laboratory and launched in 1993. The satellite was launch-ready 3.5 years after concept. ALEXIS operated on orbit for over ten years, far surpassing its design lifetime.  It surpassed all mission requirements and expectations throughout its twelve years of daily operations until its final decommissioning in 2005.

ALEXIS carried both soft X-ray astrophysics and ionospheric physics experiments. The soft X-ray experiment, ALEXIS, was a novel set of wide-angle, normal incidence telescopes, which scan half the sky every satellite rotation. BLACKBEARD, an accompanying instrument, was a broadband receiver and digitizer designed to study ionospheric propagation in the 25-175 MHz band.

The spin-stabilized spacecraft was compact and efficient - the spacecraft bus comprised only 40% of the total satellite mass (45 kg bus mass, 115 kg total mass). The bus provided 50 Watts of 28 V power to the payload while consuming 10 Watts itself. Attitude at any instant could be determined in group post-processing to ±0.25 degrees.

Payload data were recorded in an AeroAstro-supplied 96 MB spacecraft mass memory at mean rates of 10 kbits/second with peak rates in excess of 100 kbits/second. The ALEXIS system employed a "store-and-forward" architecture, passing tracking, telemetry, and control, and data between the spacecraft and a single ground station at Los Alamos. Commands are uplinked at 9600 bits/second and data are downlinked at 750 kbits/second via a steerable 2-meter dish. AeroAstro designed and built the spacecraft bus and the ground station as well as supported the launch and ground operations activities. ALEXIS was launched in April 1993 on a Pegasus booster and remained in daily operations until its decommissioning in 2005.

HETE

The HETE (High Energy Transient Experiment) spacecraft was built by AeroAstro for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with scientific cooperation from teams in the United States, France and Japan. Its mission is detection and observation of high-energy events in the gamma ray, X-ray, and UV spectra.

AeroAstro supplied the spacecraft bus (55 kg bus mass, 120 kg total mass) and ground stations, and performed all payload integration and testing. The spacecraft was designed to be a sun-pointer, with instruments pointing in the anti-sun direction. Its communications system had a 230 kbit/second data downlink rate and a 7.5 kbit/second uplink rate. Its power system supplied 67 Watts average power at a nominal 28 V to the payload.

HETE, a pathfinder for the NASA UNEX program, was launched on a Pegasus XL on November 4, 1996 with the SAC-B satellite. HETE was lost due to a launch failure and was rebuilt as HETE-2 (based on the original design) which launched successfully in 2002.

TERRIERS

AeroAstro supported Boston University in the design and fabrication of the spacecraft and ground station for Boston University's Tomographic Experiment using Radiative Recombinative Ionospheric Extreme ultraviolet and Radio Sources, TERRIERS, a remote sensing spacecraft. TERRIERS' mission was to demonstrate global ionospheric tomography and utilize the techniques to study ionospheric/thermospheric processes.

The satellite was a Thompson spinner with a bus mass of 75 kg and a total mass of 121 kg. It had magnetic torque coil control with a magnetometer and a sun and horizon crossing indicator sensor suite. The bus provided 59 Watts orbital average power.
This low-cost, fast-paced program was part of the Student Explorer Demonstration Initiative (STEDI), sponsored by the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and a precursor to the UNEX program. TERRIERS launched on May 17, 1999.

SPASE

AeroAstro developed the Small Payload Access to Space Experiment (SPASE) as part of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Future-X program. SPASE – the first mission to incorporate AeroAstro's Bitsy™ modular electronics technology, now known as the Core Avionics Modules – is designed to carry a NASA MSFC microgravity payload.

AeroAstro executed all aspects of the SPASE development, from design through fabrication and testing. AeroAstro led all Space Shuttle safety and manifesting efforts, including the accommodation of experimental Lithium Ion batteries, initially regarded as hazardous by Shuttle safety at NASA JSC.

SPASE is designed to be launched from a Space Shuttle Hitchhiker canister from inside the orbiter payload bay. Ejected from the Shuttle in a low-earth orbit, it is designed to survive 6 to 18 months until its orbit naturally decays and eventually re-enters the earth's atmosphere, burning up upon reentry.

The primary objective of the SPASE program was to demonstrate the ability to develop an extremely low-cost spacecraft in a short period of time. As such, the spacecraft is a small, relatively simple system that provides bus services to integrated science/test modules; specifically communications, command and data handling, and power management.

Most of the SPASE bus components were built in-house at AeroAstro. It incorporates two of AeroAstro's Medium Sun Sensors for attitude determination, a power management system featuring a Lithium Ion rechargeable battery, also developed by AeroAstro, as well as an AeroAstro-built 150 mW S-band radio transmitter. The C&DH system – an AeroAstro designed and built system – consists primarily of a 100 MHz Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and provides 2 MB of static RAM. It contains no software – it uses only FPGA-based digital logic. The spacecraft has been fully assembled and integrated with the payload, and it is currently awaiting a Space Shuttle Hitchhiker flight opportunity.

PA-E Rocket Engine

In the first decade of AeroAstro’s history, the company successfully developed the 12,000-lb thrust liquid propellant PA-E rocket engine, the first step towards creation of the low-cost PA-X launch vehicle for small satellites.  During one and a half years of developmental testing, the PA-E engine underwent over 70 hot fire tests, including extensive stability rating tests with a steel workhorse chamber.