LOS ANGELES—Even as satellites have proliferated, their buses—the main body and structural components—have generally remained bespoke affairs. Now a California startup aims to manufacture a line of buses that takes just a few weeks to customize and deliver.
An iPad stands near the entrance of Apex’s 50,000-square-foot facility in Los Angeles, beckoning customers to use the touch screen to choose a configuration, get a price, and place an order.
During a tour in December, the factory was fairly empty, waiting for production lines to be built, but a few employees were there, working on three Aries satellite buses. Apex’s first product, Aries, is a 100-kilogram bus about the size of a kitchen table that can hold roughly another 100 kilograms of payload. The first Aries satellite was launched in March, just a year after it was a clean-sheet design.
Those three buses have since been finished, and took a few months to build—but by April, the company aims to be able to build up to 12 satellites per month, said Ian Cinnamon, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
“There’s very few companies, I would argue maybe any at all, that were able to put three buses together in one quarter, let alone are scaling up to being able to do 12 [per month],” Cinnamon said.
For decades, the space industry operated around an architecture of large, exquisite satellite systems, a reality that has been upended in recent years. The Space Force and other space entities are now pushing for proliferated architectures with hundreds of satellites, arguing that more satellites will provide much-needed resilience.
“Apex is providing that proliferated and attritable layer for space that nobody else has really done. I think the key is not just, can you build a lot of satellites, but can you build a lot of them very quickly? And that speed element has been the biggest missing thing in the industry right now,” he said.
The three Aries buses are now sitting in Apex’s clean room, waiting for the customers to take delivery. One will go to Anduril for its planned military space missions, another to a non-disclosed customer for an Earth-sensing mission, and the third bus was built for a commercial customer.
In addition to Aries, the company will eventually start producing a mid-sized, 300-kilogram satellite bus called Nova, and Comet, a 500-kilogram bus that is much flatter than Aries or Nova, and is designed to stack like a pancake, similar to Starlink, Cinnamon said.
The 12-buses-per month can be any mix of the three satellites, he said, since the vehicles share many components, equipment and will run on the same assembly line.
All of the satellites are built to be dual use, for government or commercial missions. The Nova bus will likely be best suited for the Space Development Agency’s proliferated architecture, given that those missions will require more mass and payload, Cinnamon said, but for certain SDA missions, Aries could still be a good fit.
While Cinnamon couldn’t detail the scope of his company’s work with various government entities, he said Apex already has “close to a dozen” direct government contracts.
The new factory will be the “forever headquarters” of Apex, but the company will eventually need to build more than 12 satellites a month, Cinnamon said, indicating further growth within LA and beyond the West Coast.
“I will also say that we have plans down the line to expand outside of just Los Angeles as well. So we think about other locations around the United States, but then also other locations around the globe as well, as we work with not just the U.S. government and commercial companies, but allied nations as well,” Cinnamon said.
And as the company expands, it’s making plans to double its workforce this year to nearly 200 employees, he said.
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