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WASHINGTON — Satellite manufacturer Apex has unveiled its largest spacecraft yet, a bus designed to serve commercial and government constellation customers.
Apex announced May 28 it is now taking orders for Comet, a satellite bus significantly larger than its existing Aries and Nova products. Comet features a flat form factor that fits in a five-meter launch vehicle payload fairing and can generate more than five kilowatts of power. It can accommodate payloads weighing more than 500 kilograms.
Apex had long planned to develop Comet, including the bus in its product roadmap since the company’s early days. Strong interest in the bus from prospective customers, though, led Apex to pull forward its development.
“We’ve been getting a lot of inbound interest,” Ian Cinnamon, chief executive of Apex, said in an interview. Part of that is from companies interested in using Comet for commercial constellations in the model of SpaceX’s Starlink for applications such as direct-to-device or Internet of Things services. “Anytime you need a very large antenna in orbit looking down at the ground, it can be very useful.”
The other main source of interest has been from customers interested in Comet for defense applications, such as roles in the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system. “They’re thinking about how that fits into the overall architecture for things like the sensor layers and space-based interceptor,” he said.
Cinnamon said Apex continues to see interest in its smaller Aries and Nova buses, which serve different markets than what Comet can do. A communications constellation, he noted, has power and antenna requirements that make Comet a better fit, while a remote sensing system might be better served by the smaller Aries.
Apex has a factory in Los Angeles that will produce all three satellite buses, although for Comet there will be a 24-month lead time. “With Comet, it’s rare that someone will want one or two of them,” he said, instead buying enough to fill an entire launch vehicle to populate a constellation. “They’re probably going to want somewhere between 10 and 20.”
Comet incorporates lessons learned from Aries and Nova, including developing a more vertically integrated supply chain. “Being able to take those and then basically put them over into the larger form factor of Comet,” he said of those in-house components, “has let us create a vehicle that not only has the very unique shape that lets you put as many as possible in a Falcon 9 or any five-meter fairing, but it also lets us drive down on the price point to something where business cases actually start to make sense.”
Apex did not disclose specific pricing for Comet, but he said the price will likely be in the “mid-single-digit millions” per spacecraft.
Comet competes a roadmap that Apex created when the company started, offering small, medium and large buses. “I think that covers a big swath of the market,” Cinnamon said.
The company does not have current plans to make larger spacecraft, such as those intended to take advantage of the larger volume and mass of SpaceX’s Starship. “I love the idea of it, but the reality is that there’s no one who’re really going to buy that right now,” he said. “We focus on where the market is today and where there’s money to be made today.”
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