Last week, NanoAvionics announced ambitious plans for building satellites in the United States. The company plans to leverage its facility in Columbia, Illinois as its main facility to grow its portfolio and to expand to expand into other locations across the country. It also will coordinate all business development activities in the Latin America region out of the Columbia location.
“The USA is the largest NewSpace hub in the world and NanoAvionics US has an ambitious goal to take 30 percent of the US market share in nano-/microsatellite manufacturing and mission provision services,” F. Brent Abbott, CEO NanoAvionics US, in charge of the Columbia hub, said. “This is a direct response to the demand we are seeing, with our US revenues having already surpassed last year’s figures. We are already in on-going negotiations about satellite constellations with four NewSpace companies in the USA.”
The Columbia facility will be used to produce large numbers of nano/cubesat and microsatellite buses, for both single and constellation missions. By using a mass production approach, NanoAvionics says will be capable of manufacture hundreds of identical small satellites within a relatively short time frame of 6-10 months to support sizeable satellite constellations.
Building larger and more satellites in mass production to support commercial and national defense customers is becoming big business for the newest wave of satellite manufacturers. Denver-based York Space Systems announced last month it is producing a larger and more powerful satellite platform for a commercial constellation customer, rolling in more power, volume, payload mass, and high-speed laser communications crosslinks.
On the personnel side, Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, a division of Terran Orbital, recently added retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Christian Becker as its Chief Executive Officer. Becker served for more than 33 years in the Navy and Department of Defense, most recently as the Chief Executive of the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, where he led the global organization responsible for the design, delivery and supporting logistics of the U.S. Navy’s satellite and communications networks and enterprise-wide business systems.
