QubitCore

Space Qualification of a Complete Entanglement Distribution Payload

Michal Krelina, Alper Ozulker, Zeki Seskir, Utku Tefek, Kadir Durak

Qubitrium

Governments, banks and other organisations send messages that must stay secret for many years. Today, these messages are protected by encryption based on mathematics. Future quantum computers may break some of this encryption, and new mathematical methods are the main answer.

For a few very sensitive links, a second layer of protection is possible. It uses single particles of light to create secret keys, the numbers that lock and unlock encrypted messages. Anyone who tries to copy this light leaves a trace that both sides can detect. The same light can also share very precise time between distant places.

This light fades in glass fibre, and it cannot be boosted along the way. Over more than a few hundred kilometres, it has to come from a satellite. A Chinese satellite showed this in 2017. Since then, the problem has been the equipment. Nobody sells it ready to fly, so every mission builds its own, and this makes missions slow and expensive.

Qubitrium has built this equipment as a product. It fits in a 10 cm cube and weighs less than one kilogram. It was launched into space in March 2026, and in orbit it has made secret keys on its own, with no help from the ground. On this first flight, the light stays inside the device, so nothing is sent to the ground yet.

Later versions add a telescope that sends the light to a ground station. After that, a second telescope is planned, so that one satellite serves two ground stations at once, up to about 2,000 km apart. These two stations can then share a secret key that even the satellite does not know.

Qubitrium reached space with a few per cent of the money behind the large government programmes. It sells these parts as products, so other missions can buy them instead of building their own.