A Guide to America’s Satellite Manufacturers

The Modern Satellite: A Primer

Before exploring the companies building hardware for orbit, it’s helpful to understand what a modern satellite is. A satellite isn’t a single, monolithic object. It’s a highly complex system of two primary parts. The first is the “bus,” which is the chassis or body of the spacecraft. The bus provides all the essential housekeeping functions: the structure, the power (from solar panels and batteries), the propulsion (small thrusters to move in space), and the communications (to talk to Earth). The second part is the “payload,” which is the equipment that performs the satellite’s mission. The payload is the reason the satellite exists. It could be a powerful antenna for broadcasting internet, a sophisticated camera for taking pictures of Earth, or a scientific instrument for studying distant stars.

The satellite manufacturing industry is built around companies that provide these buses, these payloads, or, in many cases, a fully integrated spacecraft that combines both. These spacecraft are designed to perform a few key functions, which are defined by the orbit they fly in.

Orbits as Real Estate

An orbit is simply the path a satellite takes around the Earth. The three main types are Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), and Geostationary Orbit (GEO), and they function as different types of orbital real estate, each with its own advantages.

• Geostationary Orbit (GEO): At an altitude of over 35,000 kilometers, a satellite in GEO moves at the same speed as the Earth’s rotation. From the ground, it appears to hang motionless over a single point. This makes it ideal for legacy applications like broadcasting television signals or providing weather data for an entire continent. A single, large GEO satellite can cover a vast area.
• Medium Earth Orbit (MEO): Located between LEO and GEO (typically 5,000 to 20,000 kilometers up), MEO is a compromise. It offers less signal delay than GEO but still covers a large area. Its most famous use is for navigation.
• Low Earth Orbit (LEO): This is any orbit below about 1,500 kilometers. LEO is where the new space economy is booming. Its proximity to Earth means signals have very low-latency (delay), making it perfect for responsive applications like broadband internet and video calls. Its closeness also allows for much higher-resolution imaging. The drawback is that a single LEO satellite moves very fast and can only see a small patch of Earth at one time.

To provide continuous, global coverage from LEO, companies must deploy “constellations” consisting of hundreds or even thousands of satellites. This fundamental constraint of orbital mechanics dictates the entire business and manufacturing model. Building one or two bespoke GEO satellites, which might take years, is a completely different challenge than mass-producing thousands of LEO satellites on an assembly line. The rise of LEO has forced a shift in satellite manufacturing, from a high-end craft to a high-volume industrial process.

Communications Satellites

Communications satellites are the largest part of the commercial space economy. They function as relays in the sky. A ground station beams a signal (voice, video, or data) up to the satellite, which then amplifies it and beams it back down to a different location on Earth. This bypasses the need for running physical cables, connecting remote regions, ships at sea, and airplanes in flight. The massive LEO constellations being built by companies like SpaceX and Amazon are designed for a new generation of high-speed, low-latency satellite internet.

Navigation

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a constellation of satellites, operated by the U.S. Space Force, in Medium Earth Orbit. It’s a “one-way” system; the satellites don’t “know” where you are. Instead, each satellite continuously broadcasts a unique signal that includes its precise location and the time. A GPS receiver – in your phone or car – listens for these signals. By calculating its distance from at least four different satellites, the receiver can triangulate its own position on Earth in three dimensions (latitude, longitude, and altitude) as well as the precise time.

Earth Observation

Earth Observation (EO), or remote sensing, is the process of monitoring the physical characteristics of our planet from a distance. Satellites use specialized cameras and sensors to collect data on everything from weather patterns and sea-level rise to agricultural health and urban sprawl. This sensing can be “passive,” where the satellite’s camera simply records reflected sunlight (like a normal photograph). It can also be “active,” where the satellite sends out its own signal and records what bounces back. Radar is a common form of active sensing, which has the advantage of “seeing” through clouds and at night.

Military and Scientific Platforms

Many satellites serve dedicated government functions. For national security, “spy satellites” are essentially military-grade communications or Earth Observation platforms used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. This can include detecting missile launches, monitoring troop movements, or intercepting electronic communications. Scientific satellites, on the other hand, are platforms for exploration. They carry payloads like telescopes (e.g., the Hubble Space Telescope) or specialized sensors to study our solar system (like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) and the universe beyond.

The New Space Economy: A Market in Flux

The satellite manufacturing industry is currently in its most dramatic period of change ever. The global space economy is large and expanding rapidly, reaching $613 billion in 2024 and projected to cross the $1 trillion mark as soon as 2032. This growth is overwhelmingly driven by the commercial sector, which now accounts for nearly 80% of all space activity.

This boom is the result of a shift from “Old Space” to “NewSpace.” The Old Space model was defined by government-led programs. A handful of large, established aerospace companies would spend a decade and billions of dollars to build a single, exquisite, and irreplaceable satellite for a customer like NASA or the Department of Defense.

The NewSpace model is defined by a commercial-first mindset, lower costs, and speed. The single biggest enabler of this shift was the advent of reusable rockets, led by SpaceX. Suddenly, the cost to launch a kilogram of mass to orbit plummeted. This made it economically feasible to launch not just one satellite, but thousands. This change has created a new set of market dynamics, new customers, and new manufacturing philosophies.

The Government as the NewSpace Customer

This new market isn’t just commercial. The U.S. government, traditionally an “Old Space” customer, has become the most important catalyst for NewSpace manufacturing.

The Space Development Agency (SDA)

The U.S. Space Force, and specifically its Space Development Agency (SDA), has become the industry’s most influential customer. The SDA isn’t buying “Old Space” hardware. It is building a “Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture,” a massive constellation of hundreds of small, “commercially derived” satellites in LEO.

The SDA’s procurement model is built on rapid, two-year “Tranche” cycles, forcing manufacturers to adapt to “faster development cycles” and mass-production. This has created a new, hybrid market. The SDA is forcing Old Space and NewSpace to collide. Legacy primes like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are winning the “prime” contracts for these tranches. But to meet the SDA’s demands for speed and volume, they are forced to rely on NewSpace-style suppliers for the satellite buses, as seen with Lockheed’s partnership with Terran Orbital. The SDA is effectively the anchor tenant for the entire U.S. small satellite bus manufacturing industry.

NASA as an Enabler

NASA’s role has also evolved. The agency is increasingly acting as a partner and enabler rather than a top-down director. Through its Commercial Services Project, NASA is moving to buy communications services from commercial constellations rather than building its own relays. It is a key funder for commercial space stations and buys data from commercial Earth Observation companies like Planet and Maxar.

For new technologies, NASA helps “de-risk” them by co-investing in demonstration missions, such as the CAPSTONE mission that used a Rocket Lab-built satellite to test a new lunar orbit. This “first customer” stamp of approval is often what allows a NewSpace company to secure private financing and prove its technology. NASA is using its budget to seed the commercial ecosystem.

The “Kingmaker” Risk: Market Consolidation Looms

This new, vibrant landscape is not without risk. The entire ecosystem of SDA suppliers – Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Terran Orbital, York Space Systems, and others – is built on the assumption of repeated, competitive “Tranche” buys. But in 2025, the Space Force began “rethinking” this plan.

The service is studying whether to pause future SDA communications satellite buys (Tranche 3) and instead use a commercial service: SpaceX’s Starshield, the military version of its Starlink constellation.

This highlights the dependency of the new industrial base on a single government customer’s procurement strategy. Senators have raised concerns about a “dependency on SpaceX” and the potential loss of the “competitive environment” the SDA worked to create. This shows the U.S. government is in a “kingmaker” position. By choosing whether to “build its own” constellation (buying from dozens of suppliers) or “buy the service” (from one or two vertically integrated giants), it could determine which manufacturing companies thrive and which ones fail.

Key US-Based Satellite Manufacturers

The American satellite manufacturing industry is a complex ecosystem of legacy giants, vertically integrated NewSpace companies, and agile specialists. The following table provides a high-level summary of the key players profiled in this article.

The legacy aerospace and defense primes are the original architects of the satellite industry. These are the companies that built the nation’s most sensitive intelligence satellites, its deep space probes, and the foundational navigation systems the world relies on. Today, they are navigating a difficult transition, balancing their traditional “exquisite” satellite-building capabilities with the new market’s demand for speed and volume.

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, is one of the largest and most dominant defense contractors in the world. Its space division, Lockheed Martin Space, is headquartered in Littleton, Colorado, and employs about 20,000 people. For decades, this division has served as the government’s “prime mission integrator,” responsible for research, design, and production of the nation’s most vital space assets.

The company’s portfolio includes the U.S. Space Force’s Global Positioning System, where it is the prime contractor for the new-generation GPS III satellites. It also builds key components of the nation’s missile defense architecture and has a long history of building NASA’s deep space exploration probes, having participated in every NASA mission to Mars.

This history is in “Old Space” – building a few, incredibly complex satellites. The rise of the SDA’s pLEO model presented a challenge. While Lockheed won the “prime” spot on massive SDA contracts – including a $700 million contract for the Tranche 1 Transport Layer (T1TL) and an $816 million contract for the Tranche 2 Transport Layer (T2TL) – it faced a “build or buy” dilemma for the satellites themselves.

Its solution was to buy. Lockheed subcontracted the actual satellite buses to smallsat-specialist Terran Orbital, which is building 42 buses for T1TL, 36 buses for T2TL, and 18 buses for the T2 Tracking Layer. This relationship was formalized in October 2025, when Lockheed Martin completed its acquisition of Terran Orbital. This was a cultural and manufacturing graft. It allows Lockheed to buy the NewSpace agility it lacked and “speak NewSpace” to the SDA by offering Terran’s proven, high-volume production line under its own trusted “prime integrator” banner. It’s a hybrid strategy to maintain its market dominance in a new era.

Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman, with its global headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia, is another pillar of the U.S. aerospace and defense industry. Its space systems division, built on the heritage of companies like TRW, has a long history of manufacturing satellites for NASA and the Department of Defense.

The company maintains a strong, dual-pronged manufacturing business. For the commercial market, it builds the successful “GEOStar” line of geostationary communications satellites, which are used by service providers worldwide for television broadcasting and data. For the government, it builds protected military satellite communications (MILSATCOM) systems and is a key player in the SDA’s architecture, designing and building 36 satellites for the SDA’s Tranche 2 Transport Layer.

While the company’s space systems division has faced some financial headwinds, it is aggressively pioneering an entirely new sector of the space economy: in-space servicing. This push looks like a strategic hedge. The market for building new satellites is becoming hyper-competitive. But the market for servicing the thousands of satellites already in orbit – and the thousands more to come – is a blue ocean.

Northrop Grumman is creating this market from scratch. It is the only company to have operational, commercial satellite-servicing vehicles. Its Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) has already successfully docked with satellites in orbit, taking over propulsion and extending their operational lives. The company is now building on that success. It has a U.S. Space Force contract for a refueling demonstration mission called “Elixir” and is developing a “Mission Robotic Vehicle” (MRV) scheduled for a 2026 launch. The MRV will be able to perform inspections, repairs, and even debris removal.

The Boeing Company

Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS), the defense-focused division of The Boeing Company, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. Its satellite manufacturing operations, centered in El Segundo, California, have long been a cornerstone of U.S. national security and commercial communications.

In July 2025, Boeing secured one of the most significant space contracts of the decade, a $2.8 billion award from the U.S. Space Force for the Evolved Strategic Satellite (ESS) program. Beating out rival Northrop Grumman, Boeing will build the first two satellites of a new constellation that provides survivable, secure communications for Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3). This is the “doomsday” communications system, replacing the legacy Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) constellation.

While the ESS program is a prime example of a legacy, high-value contract, Boeing’s manufacturing is not limited to “Old Space.” A key factor in its win was that the software-defined communications payloads in ESS have been proven on-orbit with Boeing-built spacecraft in SES’s O3b mPOWER satellite network.

This reveals a “NewSpace-infused” traditionalist strategy. Boeing is using the fast-paced, lower-cost commercial market as a rapid testbed for its advanced technology. It then ports that flight-proven tech to its “exquisite” government contracts. It’s a modern approach that just won them one of the decade’s most important programs.

L3Harris Technologies

Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, L3Harris Technologies was formed from the 2019 merger of L3 Technologies and Harris Corporation, creating an aerospace and defense technology giant. In the satellite industry, L3Harris has carved out a unique and powerful position. While it does produce some end-to-end small satellite solutions, its primary business is not in building the bus, but in manufacturing the payloads and subsystems.

L3Harris is a merchant supplier of the most advanced “eyes,” “ears,” and “brains” for satellites. This includes advanced electro-optical sensors and imagers, satellite antennas and navigation technology, and secure, encrypted SATCOM systems and radios. The company is a technology provider on critical NASA missions like the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis program.

This “Intel Inside” strategy is highly resilient. L3Harris’s success isn’t tied to which prime contractor wins a big program, because it is likely to be a key supplier to all the bidders.

BAE Systems

BAE Systems, a major global defense firm with U.S. headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia, made a dramatic and decisive entry into the U.S. satellite manufacturing market. In 2024, BAE completed its $5.6 billion acquisition of Ball Aerospace.

This acquisition was not a minor addition; it was a complete transformation. Ball Aerospace, with its long and distinguished track record, was one of the industry’s most respected independent manufacturers of spacecraft, mission payloads, optical systems, and advanced antennas. Upon acquisition, Ball Aerospace was rebranded and became BAE’s new “Space & Mission Systems” (S&MS) division, headquartered in Ball’s former home of Broomfield, Colorado.

This move was a major consolidation. It instantly gave BAE a world-class space division with a skilled workforce of over 5,200 employees and trusted relationships with the Intelligence Community and U.S. Department of Defense. It removed a key independent supplier (Ball) from the market and immediately established BAE as a new prime-level competitor for high-end sensor and satellite manufacturing contracts.

The New Guard: Vertically Integrated Giants

While the legacy primes adapt, a new class of manufacturer has emerged. These “New Guard” companies are defined by vertical integration: they design, manufacture, and (in most cases) launch their own hardware. They are building satellites not primarily to sell the satellite, but to build their own constellations to sell a service.

The old satellite industry was dominated by the “Big 3” defense primes (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop). The new LEO constellation industry is completely dominated by “Big Tech” billionaires. This is most evident in the clustering of SpaceX’s satellite factory and Amazon’s Project Kuiper factory in Redmond, Washington. They are tapping the software, logistics, and high-tech manufacturing talent pool of the Seattle area, home to Microsoft and Amazon. This shows their manufacturing philosophy is more like building consumer electronics at scale than traditional aerospace.

SpaceX

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is the company most responsible for the NewSpace revolution. While its headquarters are now officially at its Starbase, Texas, launch and development site, its historic headquarters and key production center remains in Hawthorne, California, with its Starlink satellite manufacturing factory located in Redmond, Washington.

SpaceX is the “world’s dominant space launch provider,” and it built that capability to serve its primary goal: deploying its own mega-constellation, Starlink. Starlink is a network of thousands of small satellites in LEO designed to provide global broadband internet. To build this constellation, SpaceX employs extreme vertical integration, manufacturing its engines, rockets, and satellites almost entirely in-house. This model, with engineering and manufacturing co-located, allows for rapid iteration and cost control that competitors can’t match.

SpaceX exists in a closed-loop feedback system that no competitor can replicate. It needed to launch its Starlink satellites, which required cheap launch. It perfected reusable rockets, making launch cheap. Cheap launch enabled the rapid deployment of thousands of satellites. The need to build thousands of satellites forced it to master mass manufacturing. Now, the combination of its cheap launch and mass-manufacturing prowess allows it to offer a product (Starshield, the military version) that threatens to upend the entire defense procurement market.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper

Project Kuiper is Amazon’s subsidiary, Kuiper Systems LLC, founded in 2019 to build its own LEO satellite internet constellation. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Amazon is in a head-to-head race with SpaceX. Its goal is to deploy a constellation of 3,236 satellites to provide fast, reliable internet to unserved communities.

Amazon has invested heavily in its manufacturing and processing infrastructure, including a $140 million payload processing facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The company has a critical deadline from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch and operate half of its constellation – over 1,600 satellites – by July 2026.

This deadline has forced Amazon into a “brute force” manufacturing and launch campaign. The company has purchased over 92 rocket launches from ULA, ArianeGroup, and Blue Origin, spending over $10 billion. Unlike SpaceX, which grew its launch and manufacturing capabilities organically, Amazon is attempting to create a rival constellation from a standing start through sheer capital expenditure. The pressure to meet its FCC deadline is so high that it has even booked launches with its direct competitor, SpaceX, to get its satellites to orbit in 2t025. This is a high-stakes bet on manufacturing speed and capital depth.

Rocket Lab

Rocket Lab, a New Zealand-founded company with its U.S. headquarters in Long Beach, California, has grown from a small-satellite launch provider into an “end-to-end” space company. While it’s famous for its Electron rocket, a significant and growing part of its business is satellite manufacturing.

The company manufactures the “Photon” satellite bus. The Photon platform is a highly capable and versatile spacecraft that evolved from the Electron rocket’s “kick stage.” Rocket Lab’s business model is to provide a “turnkey service.” A customer with a payload – whether it’s a NASA sensor, a startup’s new radio, or a university experiment – can simply bring their “payload or idea,” and Rocket Lab provides a complete, integrated solution: a Photon bus, payload integration, and launch on an Electron rocket.

This “one-stop-shop” model has proven highly successful. Rocket Lab’s Photon was the bus used for NASA’s historic CAPSTONE mission, which flew to the Moon. Rocket Lab has cleverly differentiated itself from the giants. It’s not trying to build its own mega-constellation. It has become the “go-to” enabler for everyone else.

The Specialists: Pioneers of the SmallSat Revolution

Beyond the giants, a diverse ecosystem of “NewSpace Specialists” has emerged. These companies are focused on a specific part of the satellite value chain. Many are “merchant suppliers” of satellite buses, the chassis that other companies build upon. This sub-sector has been supercharged by the SDA’s demand for hundreds of standardized, commoditized platforms.

Sierra Space

Sierra Space, headquartered in Louisville, Colorado, is a company that blurs the line between NewSpace and legacy. Though it was “founded” in 2021 as a spin-off from its parent, Sierra Nevada Corporation, it brought with it “a legacy of nearly 30 years.” In that time, the division delivered over 4,000 “satellite systems, components, and on-orbit spacecraft” across more than 500 missions.

This is a fascinating hybrid. Sierra Space has the branding, venture funding ($1.7B in Series A/B), and “NewSpace” identity of a startup. But it also has the 30-year flight heritage and deep customer trust of a legacy prime. This dual identity allows it to compete for headline-grabbing projects like “Dream Chaser,” the world’s only commercial runway-capable spaceplane, while also being a trusted, “safe pair of hands” for critical SDA manufacturing contracts. In September 2025, the company successfully completed the critical design review for its Tranche 2 missile tracking satellites.

Vantor and Lanteris (Formerly Maxar)

Maxar Technologies was long known as the premier provider of high-resolution Earth Observation imagery. In a significant corporate rebranding in October 2025, the parent holding company was split into two:

• Vantor: The Earth Intelligence and data analytics business, headquartered in Westminster, Colorado.
• Lanteris: The Space Infrastructure and satellite manufacturing business, headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

This company (now Vantor and Lanteris) operates its own constellation of high-performance imaging satellites. Its new flagship constellation is “WorldView Legion.” The full constellation of six satellites, which completed its launch campaign in February 2025, provides 34cm panchromatic resolution imagery – the highest resolution commercially available.

This is not the SpaceX “do-everything” vertical integration. This is the “Apple” model. Vantor (the “brand”) designs the user experience (data analytics). Lanteris (the “manufacturer”) assembles the product (the satellite bus). But they source the most critical component (the “next-generation imaging instrument”) from a specialized, best-in-class partner: Raytheon (an RTX company). This allows each company to focus on what it does best.

Terran Orbital (A Lockheed Martin Company)

Terran Orbital is a leading manufacturer of small satellites, headquartered in Irvine, California. The company is a “vertically integrated provider of end-to-end satellite solutions” and was a key winner of the Space Force’s STEP 2.0 contract, a 10-year program to procure modular small satellite buses for technology demonstrations.

Terran Orbital’s business became almost completely intertwined with its largest customer, Lockheed Martin. As detailed earlier, Terran serves as the primary bus manufacturer for Lockheed’s massive SDA contracts, building 42 buses for T1TL, 36 buses for T2TL Beta, and 18 buses for the T2 Tracking Layer.

Terran Orbital represents the end-game of the hybrid “Old Space meets NewSpace” market. It was a successful independent bus manufacturer that became so good at fulfilling the SDA’s demand that its prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, bought the company outright in 2025. It now functions as Lockheed’s in-house, high-volume smallsat division.

Blue Canyon Technologies (An RTX Company)

Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT), a subsidiary of RTX (Raytheon) headquartered in Lafayette, Colorado, is another key provider of “turnkey small satellite solutions.” Like Terran Orbital, BCT is a “merchant supplier” of satellite buses, from tiny 3U CubeSats up to larger spacecraft. It was also selected for the Space Force’s 10-year STEP 2.0 contract.

In August 2025, BCT unveiled its new, larger “Saturn-400” spacecraft bus. This bus is designed to fill a “missing middle” in the market, capable of handling payloads up to 600kg. This new platform is not a speculative product; it’s specifically intended to fill out the Pentagon’s vision for future missile-defense spacecraft. BCT sees that future missions (like the “Golden Dome” concept) will need “larger aperture telescopes,” which require a bigger bus. BCT is building that specific bus before the contracts are even awarded, positioning itself (and its parent, RTX) to be the go-to supplier for the next generation of proliferated defense constellations.

Planet Labs

Planet Labs, headquartered in San Francisco, is a NewSpace company with a unique manufacturing and business model. It is “fully vertically integrated,” operating every part of its business except for launch. The company manufactures its own two lines of satellites: the “Dove,” a small, loaf-of-bread-sized satellite for medium-resolution imagery, and the “SkySat,” a larger satellite for high-resolution imagery.

Planet’s in-house manufacturing, based in its San Francisco office, allows it to mass-produce these satellites. It operates the “largest constellation of satellites ever launched,” with more than 350 satellites in orbit.

The company’s business model is important to understand. Like SpaceX, it is vertically integrated. But it doesn’t sell satellites. It builds satellites so it can sell data. The satellite manufacturing is a means to an end. This “quantity-over-quality” manufacturing model (building hundreds of cheap “Doves”) is what enables its unique data product: a daily snapshot of the entire globe. No one else has this. Planet is fundamentally a data analytics company that just happens to be a world-class satellite manufacturer, a model it uses to service clients like NASA.

Spire Global

Spire Global, with its U.S. headquarters in Vienna, Virginia, is another vertically integrated NewSpace company that operates a large constellation of over 100 satellites. Spire’s satellites are multi-payload platforms that collect data on global weather, ship and plane movements.

Spire’s innovation is its “Space as a Service” (SPaaS) business model. This model has two parts. First, like Planet, Spire sells the data from its own constellation as a subscription to organizations like NOAA. Second, it also offers its satellite platform as a service. A customer can pay Spire a subscription to fly their payload on a Spire-built, Spire-operated satellite. Spire “handles the end-to-end management, from manufacturing to launch to satellite operations,” allowing customers to get to space without ever having to build a satellite.

Spire is running the “Amazon Web Services” (AWS) playbook for the space industry. Before AWS, a startup had to buy its own servers. After AWS, it just rents computing by the hour. Before Spire, a company with a new sensor had to build its own satellite. With Spire, that company just pays a subscription. Spire is “abstracting” the hardware away from the customer, positioning itself as a space “utility” platform.

The Evolving Orbit: Future Technologies and Shared Challenges

The satellite manufacturing industry, for all its growth, is facing a series of significant technical and logistical hurdles. The very boom in satellite production is creating challenges in supply chains, orbital sustainability, and the fundamental technology of spaceflight itself.

The Manufacturing Supply Chain

The industry’s central tension is its transition from building “large, highly bespoke satellites with decade-long build cycles to one that also needs to be able to pump out dozens of satellites for constellation networks.” This has put immense strain on a supply chain that was never designed for high-volume production.

Government customers, like the SDA, are pushing for speed, and U.S. military space officials have expressed frustration at “lateness or budget overruns.” But the shortfalls are real. Key chokepoints include on-orbit propulsion systems, optical (laser) communications terminals, and, most importantly, “hardened electronics.”

This “rad-hard” bottleneck is a major problem. Satellites are constantly exposed to radiation. While commercial constellations like Starlink can use cheaper, automotive-grade electronics and simply replace their satellites every few years, this is not an option for multi-hundred-million-dollar military programs. The Pentagon demands “radiation-hardened” (rad-hard) electronics. These are specialized, low-volume, and expensive components. The sudden, massive demand for rad-hard chips, driven by the SDA’s pLEO constellation orders, has caused a supply chain bottleneck that the existing “niche” market can’t handle.

The Propulsion Revolution: Moving with Electricity

For decades, satellites moved in space using chemical rockets, which are powerful but heavy and fuel-inefficient. Today’s constellations are enabled by a different technology: electric propulsion (EP).

An EP system, such as a Hall thruster or a gridded ion engine, works by using electrical power from the satellite’s solar panels to create an electric or magnetic field. This field is used to ionize (positively charge) a small amount of inert gas propellant, like xenon or krypton. These ions are then accelerated and shot out the back at high velocity, creating a small but relentless amount of thrust.

Electric propulsion is not powerful; it provides a gentle, continuous push. But it is incredibly efficient. It can achieve the same change in velocity using many times less propellant mass than a chemical rocket.

This efficiency is the unsung hero of the LEO constellation. A launch vehicle can “drop off” dozens of satellites in a general “parking” orbit. The satellites then use their own efficient electric thrusters to, over a period of weeks or months, slowly and precisely raise themselves into their final operational orbits.

The Orbital Debris Problem

The satellite boom has a dangerous side effect. Earth’s orbit is becoming an “immense junk yard” filled with “thousands of inactive satellites, rocket fragments, and collision-generated particles.” There are approximately 35,000 tracked objects in orbit, but only one-third of them are active satellites. Worse, there are an estimated one million untracked debris objects larger than one centimeter, each traveling fast enough to catastrophically damage an active satellite.

This “invisible landfill” poses a direct economic and operational threat to all space operations. Solutions are complex. They include mitigation (designing new satellites to de-orbit themselves) and Active Debris Removal (ADR), which involves sending “hunter” satellites to capture and remove the largest, most dangerous pieces of junk. ADR is technologically difficult, expensive, and politically complicated. Grabbing a foreign-owned satellite, even if it’s “dead,” could be interpreted as a hostile act.

This orbital debris threat is a ticking clock that could cripple the trillion-dollar space economy it helped create. But this risk is also a new business opportunity. The problem has become so severe that a new “in-orbit janitor” sub-industry is emerging. Companies like Astroscale and programs from established players, like Northrop Grumman’s MRV, are being designed specifically for “debris removal.”

The Next Frontier: In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM)

For 60 years, the space industry has been defined by a simple rule: you launch what you build, and you can never touch it again. This paradigm is finally changing. The next great shift for the industry is In-space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM).

• Servicing: This involves repairing, refueling, or upgrading satellites already in orbit. Northrop Grumman is the clear leader here, with its operational MEV and its upcoming MRV and Elixir refueling demo.
• Assembly: This means launching components and robotically assembling them in space to build structures – like large telescopes or space stations – that would be too large to fit in a single rocket’s fairing.
• Manufacturing: This is the concept of a “factory in orbit,” using 3D printing and other techniques to manufacture components directly in space, leveraging the microgravity environment.

The U.S. government has identified ISAM as a national priority, and NASA is actively funding technology demonstrations. This represents the transition from an “Earth-to-Orbit” economy to a true “in-orbit” economy. This shift will fundamentally change manufacturing. Instead of building disposable satellites, companies will build serviceable “platforms” designed to be upgraded. This creates an entirely new circular economy for “space tugs” to move assets, “service” vehicles to conduct repairs, and on-orbit manufacturing to supply new parts.

Summary

The United States satellite manufacturing industry is in a period of intense, rapid transformation. The old model – defined by a few government-funded prime contractors building bespoke, billion-dollar satellites – is not gone, but it has been forced to adapt to a new, dual-market reality.

The first new market is dominated by vertically-integrated “NewSpace” giants like SpaceX and Amazon’s Project Kuiper. These companies are applying a mass-production, consumer-electronics philosophy to build their own private constellations, aiming to sell a service like global internet. They are joined by data-first companies like Planet Labs, which manufactures its own “flock” of satellites to sell a unique daily snapshot of the Earth.

The second new market is a hybrid defense sector, driven almost entirely by the Space Development Agency’s demand for proliferated LEO constellations. In this market, “Old Space” primes like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have retained their role as trusted integrators. But to build satellites at the scale and speed the SDA demands, they have been forced to partner with – and in some cases, acquire – the very “NewSpace Specialist” companies (like Terran Orbital and Blue Canyon) that were created by this new paradigm.

This new ecosystem is defined by deep, and sometimes complex, interdependencies. A prime contractor (Boeing) builds a military satellite (ESS) using technology it proved on a commercial payload (O3b mPOWER). A payload specialist (Raytheon/RTX) builds the “eyes” for a satellite built by a platform specialist (Lanteris/Maxar), which is a key supplier to its own bus-manufacturing subsidiary (Blue Canyon).

As this industry consolidates, it faces shared, existential challenges. Its own success is creating crippling supply chain bottlenecks for critical “rad-hard” electronics and driving the orbital debris problem to a breaking point. The solutions to these challenges – electric propulsion, active debris removal, and in-orbit servicing – are themselves creating the next generation of satellite manufacturing, one that will eventually move the factory floor from Earth into orbit itself.