In March 2025 SpaceX launched a Rogue Space Systems cubesat with an IVO Ltd Quantum (QI) Drive on it. Up till Christmas I was monitoring its trajectory, almost every day and it did seem to push up by about a few metres when it seemed from personal communications that they had turned it on, but analyses like this are very subjective.
Unfortunately, as you may know, there was a engineering glitch so the thruster could not be turned on for more than a minute before problems arose, so the hoped-for orbit raise of kilometers did not come to pass. Which leaves us in a less than ideal position. Can we see if there is a thrust? We probably cannot do this for certain, but I collected a lot of data from SatNOGS DB (nearly every day for several months) so it makes sense to see what we can get from it.
They always say "Don't compare yourself with others," but in science that is a valid method. One thing we can do is to use a control: a similar satellite without a QI drive. The IVO Sat (Norad ID = 63235) had a close twin brother (Norad ID = 63220) which was the same shape and mass and was launched by the same Falcon 9 rocket into about the same orbit. So, we can look at their fall over the last three months and see if the IVO Sat fell less than the control satellite. IVOsat fell from 506.3 km on 30/9/25 to 501.42 km on 30/12/25, a fall of 4880 metres. The other satellite fell from 504.98 km to 499.5 km so a fall of 5480 metres. Therefore the IVOsat fell 600 metres less over three months. Does that mean the QI Drive thrust it up by 600 meters over that time? Possibly. Is that the rise we expect give the thrusting they did?
The thrust generated by the QI quantum drive was expected to be 1.75 mN and the mass of the satellite is 20 kg which means that the along track acceleration (a) will be
a = F/mass = 0.00175/20 = 8.75x10^-5 m/s^2
Since I happen to know that the typical burn time was about a minute, and if we assume it was fired once every other day, a reasonable guess, then the change in speed per day (dv) is
dv = 8.75x10^-5 x 60 /2 = 0.002625 m/s
The change in height (dH) is
dH = 2.dv.sqrt(r^3/GM) = 5 metres per day
The observed rise (compared to its twin) was 600 metres in 90 days, which is 6.6 metres per day. Therefore the IVOsat moved up relative to its twin satellite by about the height you might expect if the Quantum Drive was being fired every other day for one minute on average. It looks plausible, but it could be that the drive was generating a Lorentz force and pushing off the Earth's magnetic field. My calculation of the Lorentz force suggests it's too small but I do not have detailed knowledge of the circuitry in the drive. We had hoped to have thrust large enough to avoid ambiguities like this but that has not been the case.
If this QI Quantum Drive was indeed thrusting then it means a radical change to the entire satellite industry because we can now have onboard thrusters that are silent and do not need to carry heavy fuel so they will last much longer, but we are not in a position to say that yet. Anyway, a big thank you to IVO Ltd, Rogue Space Systems and SpaceX who got the test up there (an amazing feat in itself) and have produced some results. I hope they will soon make a more detailed press release on it.
