Lars Rasmussen retweetledi
Astranis today builds more commercial GEO satellites than the rest of the industry combined.
But we're not stopping there. We believe it’s critical that we bring back manufacturing to America and rebuild our industrial base. Especially in aerospace and defense.
That’s why we are scaling up production, tripling our output from 8 to 24 satellites per year. We have no choice— our commercial and defense customers demand it. They want as many satellites as we can build.
Here’s how:
‣ We’re making huge investments in our in-house machining capabilities. That includes our massive new Makino Mag3.EX. It’s a beast of a horizontal endmill, weighing in at 100,000 pounds. it can remove a ridiculous 75 pounds of metal per minute. We’re using it to bring structural panel builds in house. Previously, those panels were quoted with over a 1-year lead time, but we’ll machine our own panels in a single day.
‣ We’ve added other CNC machines in total now also, basically bringing them in as fast as we can buy them, from manufacturers like Haas, Matsuura, and DMG Mori. And we are running lights-out on many of these machines today, building everything from brackets to boxes to other structural elements, in house, from raw aluminum and titanium stock.
‣ We’re upgrading our in-house testing and qualification. We added a new crown jewel recently, a massive 15-foot-diameter vacuum chamber with pumps capable of maintaining a hard vacuum even as we fire xenon thrusters inside it. We’ve done some outrageously cool testing in this chamber, bringing in house yet another costly and time-consuming test.
‣ We upgraded our electronics labs, outfitting them with state of the art equipment for board bringup and testing. Power supplies, signal generators, spectrum analyzers, and more. We now have two large labs— one for our digital payloads, and one for the satellite bus including power, avionics, and guidance-navigation-control (GNC) systems.
‣ And, of course, we’re hiring. We now have an incredible team of 500 working out of our San Francisco office daily, and we’re hiring even more now to reach scale. We may be the largest company in SF with a 5-days-per-week in person office culture. Because there’s no other way to build real hardware.
This is the kind of investment in our capabilities it takes to bring real manufacturing back to America— a lot of hardware, a lot of people, and a lot of iterative improvement along the way. But we know we can do it, and we know we must do it. For our customers and for our country.
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