Levitas: Making Microgravity Easier to Access

A marketplace that helps organisations find the providers, facilities and funding they need for microgravity research. 

In microgravity, researchers can study biological systems, materials and physical processes in ways that are hard or impossible to reproduce on Earth. That could mean higher-quality protein crystals, new drug formulations, or a better understanding of how materials behave. It can also lead to new intellectual property and products. 

For most organisations, the hard part is not the science but knowing where to start. The Satellite Applications Catapult built Levitas to fix that. 

More Options, Harder Choices 

Organisations can now choose from parabolic flights, drop towers, sounding rockets, recoverable spacecraft, orbital facilities and emerging commercial space stations. Each offers different conditions, timescales and technical capabilities. A single experiment may also need several specialist partners for design, payload development, testing, launch integration, operations and recovery. 

Providers describe their services in different ways, few publish prices, and until now no one has mapped the whole market. Approaching the wrong provider can cost weeks before the experiment itself moves forward. 

What Levitas Does 

Levitas is a public, live catalogue of microgravity providers, facilities and expertise. It describes every service in the same terms and places each one on a six-stage mission pathway, from funding and compliance through payload development and mission delivery to data or sample return. 

With Levitas, users can: 

• search providers, services, environments and platforms 
• see where each service fits in the mission chain 
• compare up to three services side by side 
• find live funding routes for a mission 
• contact providers and assemble a delivery team 

Users who don’t know the sector can ask Graviton, Levitas’s AI assistant. They describe a research problem in plain English, and Graviton recommends providers, platforms and services from the marketplace. 

Explore the Levitas microgravity marketplace 

Who It Is For 

You do not need to be a space company to use microgravity. Levitas serves pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, universities, advanced manufacturers, materials innovators, start-ups and R&D teams. Some will be testing an early idea. Others will already have a concept and need partners to deliver it. 

For example, a biotechnology company asking whether microgravity could improve protein crystallisation may need scientific advice, payload development, a flight provider and funding. Levitas shows which organisations offer each of these and how they fit together. 

Have an idea that could benefit from microgravity? Find potential partners on Levitas 

For Providers 

Levitas also helps providers reach customers outside the space sector. A common format lets them explain what they offer and where they sit on the mission pathway. The marketplace brings more of a fragmented supply chain into one place, which makes UK capability easier for new customers to find and use. 

The first provider listing is live. Further listings are going through company approval before publication. 

Provide microgravity-related services? Visit Levitas and join the marketplace 

A Clearer Route In 

Launch capability alone will not grow the microgravity economy. Organisations also need clear routes into the market and the right partners. Levitas makes those easier to find, whether you are exploring an early idea or planning your first mission. 

Start your microgravity journey with Levitas