A Marietta company is sending a piece of its hardware into orbit this fall, betting that a composite tile weighing about as much as a smartphone can hold up against space junk traveling 17,000 miles per hour. Atomic-6's Space Armor tile is set for its first operational deployment on a mission slated to launch in late October, riding aboard a satellite built by Bothell-based Portal Space Systems.
The tile, about 3 millimeters thick, will be affixed to Portal's Starburst-1 satellite and is designed to protect spacecraft from micrometeoroids and orbital debris, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. SpaceX plans to launch the rocket from Cape Canaveral into orbit this fall, and the tile will travel in Earth's orbit for at least a year once it gets there. Reporter Mirtha Donastorg, who covers Black wealth, entrepreneurship, minority-owned businesses, and innovation at Atlanta's HBCUs for the paper, broke down how the Marietta-based company arrived at this moment.
Atomic-6 chief executive Trevor Smith said the company has completed its terrestrial testing, meaning the tile has already proven itself on the ground before facing the real thing in orbit. In lab conditions, the material stopped debris pieces similar in size to 3-millimeter aluminum balls at an impact velocity of about 17,000 miles per hour, and it reportedly catches roughly 90 percent of debris impacts in testing. The tile is made from an aluminum composite that absorbs the shock from debris impacts, an approach the company says improves on the initial metal layer used in spacecraft while drawing on traditional spacecraft armor structures developed over decades.
Why a Thin Composite Tile Beats Old Metal Shields
Standard spacecraft defense has long relied on the Whipple shield, a spaced metal armor design invented in 1946 by astronomer Fred Whipple, according to Wikipedia. That design, which predates Sputnik 1 by 11 years, breaks up hypervelocity impacts into dispersed debris before they reach a spacecraft's inner hull, but the metal bumpers involved add significant parasitic mass to satellites. Atomic-6's tile aims to fix two legacy limitations of those decades-old shields: excess weight and radio signal interference, since traditional metal shields can block radio signals while the composite tile is radio-frequency permeable, letting onboard communication equipment beneath the shield keep transmitting without interruption.
Space Armor is intended to make protection a necessary, standard component of spacecraft design rather than an afterthought, per the AJC's reporting. Atomic-6 has also developed a heavier-duty version of the tile, called Max, built to protect crewed space stations and larger hardware against particles up to 12.5 millimeters, while the Lite version flying on Starburst-1 is designed for micrometeoroids up to 3 millimeters, according to Payload Space. The Starburst-1 satellite carrying the tile was developed by Portal Space Systems, whose chief executive Jeff Thornburg previously worked in propulsion roles at SpaceX and Amazon.
A Crowded Orbit Is Forcing a Rethink
The stakes behind this kind of hardware are growing. Global surveillance networks in 2026 track roughly 44,000 orbital debris objects larger than 10 centimeters, while statistical models estimate more than 1.2 million fragments between 1 and 10 centimeters and 140 million particles smaller than 1 centimeter are also drifting in orbit, per eoPortal. Even objects too small to track can breach an unarmored satellite hull at hypervelocity speeds.
That congestion is already straining satellites' fuel-based defenses. Public filings show collision-avoidance maneuvers performed by SpaceX's Starlink constellation jumped from 6,873 over a six-month stretch ending in May 2022 to 144,404 maneuvers between December 2024 and May 2025, according to research published on arXiv. Each thruster burn used to dodge debris consumes finite propellant and shortens a satellite's operational life, which is part of why passive shielding like Atomic-6's tile is drawing interest as an alternative, or complement, to constant maneuvering.
The Marietta Company Behind the Tile
Atomic-6 was founded in 2018 in Marietta by Trevor Smith, a former commercial real estate agent who named the company after carbon, the sixth element on the periodic table, to reflect its focus on ultra-light carbon-fiber composites for aerospace, defense, and hypersonics work. Beyond the debris shield, the company also manufactures redeployable Light Wing solar arrays and Hot Wing thermal radiators, and it told 11Alive it fielded $3 billion in contract bid requests from major constellation operators over a recent 12-month stretch. In April, space energy startup Mantis Space selected Atomic-6 as a preferred vendor to integrate composite solar arrays and thermal radiators into a planned satellite constellation meant to beam continuous power to other spacecraft in orbit.
Portal Space Systems, the company that built the Starburst-1 satellite carrying Atomic-6's tile, has its own momentum: it raised $50 million in Series A funding in April to scale up production of its reconfigurable spacecraft platforms. For Atomic-6, the October flight is largely a proof-of-concept mission — the company hopes the tile actually takes a minor debris strike while an onboard camera records the impact, since real flight validation is considered essential before constellation operators will buy composite armor at scale. If the tile performs as tested, Smith and his team believe it could become a standard feature on future spacecraft rather than an optional upgrade.
