Aerospace · Development
Plasma-sail modelling
Software that models spacecraft pushed by the solar wind instead of rocket fuel, being checked case by case against the published research on the idea.
Direct Leap is a research company.
We write simulation software for space propulsion and for processing lunar materials, and publish the code and papers. From 2001 to 2019 the company built telecom systems; that business is retired.
Projects
Four public repositories, and one project not yet public.
Plasma simulation
WarpX on Apple Silicon
Getting WarpX, a widely used plasma-physics simulation code, to run on Apple’s graphics processors.
Lunar resources
Regolith Pyrolysis Simulator
Models of extracting oxygen and metals from lunar soil, by heating it in a vacuum or by passing a current through it once molten.
Materials chemistry
OpenIMCC
Calculates how the components of molten rock behave at high temperature, which the regolith models need.
Software tooling
goal-flight
Tooling for running AI coding agents on long projects, with a second model reviewing every change.
Papers
Our first papers date from October 2002: a reusable tether in Earth orbit to throw spacecraft toward Mars, written with Robert Hoyt of Tethers Unlimited, and a constellation of small relay satellites for Mars.
All papersCompany history
Direct Leap started in Toronto in 2001 as a telecom engineering firm, and was incorporated in 2002. Its clients included Primus, Lavalife and Consultronics. From 2004 it ran its own calling and polling services, used by pollsters such as Environics and EKOS and by field experiments at Yale and Notre Dame.
Those services were retired in 2019.
Company history