Apex Space announced Tuesday that its first vehicle is successfully operating in orbit, moving it one step closer to its goal of transforming satellite bus manufacturing.
The company launched the first of a class of satellites Apex calls Aries on SpaceX's Transporter 10 rideshare mission on Monday. Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon said in a recent interview that the spacecraft happened to be flying over a ground station, allowing communications to be established with the spacecraft immediately after it deployed into orbit. said Ian Cinnamon, CEO of Apex.
The company first received so-called UHF beacons (essentially a type of backup radio signal) that transmit data packets about the spacecraft's health. Mission operators were able to downlink some of these health packets before switching to S-band radios. This allowed the spacecraft to transmit faster data and, more importantly, allow two-way communication with ground stations.
This data confirmed that the spacecraft is alive and well in orbit and, to their knowledge, marked a new record for the fastest time from clean-sheet design to production spacecraft in orbit in one year.
Los Angeles-based Apex is now preparing to begin a series of tests on the vehicle and its subsystems before handing over the platform to customers. These unnamed customers plan to run their payloads for about six months.
Cinnamon said the plan wasn't necessarily to fly a customer payload on this first mission, which was originally designed as a technology demonstrator.
“But once we started talking to customers who wanted to buy the entire satellite themselves, […] They started saying, why don't we pay you to put a small payload here and test something for a few months as a way to learn about you? So we started saying, “So what?” We have plenty of room and it will be good practice for us. We make money little by little and it helps us build good relationships. ”
Once the customer achieves its objectives, the Aries SN1 satellite will become a continuous software testbed in orbit, which Apex will use to test flight software and guidance, navigation, and control systems. The satellite is designed to last an additional five years in space.
“This will be extremely valuable for many years to come as the satellite remains in orbit,” Cinnamon said.
Apex, backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Shield Capital, among others, is developing a commercialized satellite bus to solve the satellite bus “bottleneck” facing the space industry. In addition to Aries, an ESPA-class spacecraft bus that can support payloads of up to 100 kilograms, the company is also developing two of his larger bus product lines, Nova and Comet. Apex aims to start production in 2025.