NEUROSPACE GmbH

NEUROSPACE GmbH is a Berlin startup founded in 2020 that develops modular robotic rovers for lunar exploration and terrestrial use. Irene Selvanathan is CEO and managing director, alongside co-founders Oliver Romald Siebert (legal) and Johannes Rojahn (VP Design). The company is registered at the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf local court under HRB 217893 B. It opened its Berlin headquarters in 2021, now lists its address as Keithstrasse 26, and reports more than 18 employees. Partners and customers named on its site include DLR, ESA, Technische Universitaet Berlin, Ernst-Abbe-Hochschule Jena, the University of Luxembourg and Charite Berlin.

Its core product is the HiveR rover platform. HiveR applies the CubeSat standard to a Moon rover, so payload builders can mount experiments in standard CubeSat form factors without developing a rover themselves. NEUROSPACE calls this an Open Rover Standard and describes HiveR as the world's first modular rover platform. Development follows a tiered approach that takes experiments from early concepts through terrestrial testing to the lunar surface, and the same vehicle can work on Earth. The rover was designed for teleoperation. HiveR Mission Control is a plug-and-play wireless control centre with a browser interface that can run fleets of robots from anywhere, and the wider HiveR ecosystem includes tools to simulate rover missions on Earth or the Moon. The company has also used the phrase interplanetary swarm robotics for its longer-term goal.

The first customer delivery came on 8 November 2023, when DLR's Microgravity User Support Center (MUSC) in Cologne received a HiveR rover measuring 45 x 35 x 30 cm for the LUNA analog facility. It was driven inside the MUSC building, and its controls were then integrated into LUNA's mission control system. A second rover was expected the following month.

Because existing CubeSat parts cannot simply be moved from low Earth orbit to the Moon, NEUROSPACE plans to qualify rover components step by step through a series of space missions. First, a payload testing the rover's space-qualified mechanical and electronic systems launched on 23 June 2025 on a Falcon 9 as part of the Hemera mission. Launch and orbital insertion went well, but contact with the return capsule was lost during re-entry. Second, NASA selected the company in January 2024 to fly TACHELES, a 12U CubeSat carrying HiveR rover electronics, as a secondary payload on Artemis II, under a June 2024 agreement between DLR and NASA. The satellite was meant to cross the Van Allen belts repeatedly in a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee radius of about 77,700 km, testing rover electronics for single-event effects, radiation tolerance, temperature extremes and longevity. NEUROSPACE handed TACHELES over to NASA at Kennedy Space Center on 16 September 2025, and it launched with Artemis II on 1 April 2026. It was the first German NewSpace startup payload on a crewed lunar mission. TACHELES deployed successfully, but ground stations could not establish contact, and the CubeSat could not raise its perigee and burned up at its first perigee pass.