Apex - Satellite Platforms

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Meet Amanda Mosinski, AI&T Technician III at Apex! Amanda brings over a decade of hands-on manufacturing experience to Apex. She kicked off her career machining V8 and V6 Turbo engines at Toyota Motor Manufacturing before making the leap into aerospace at Blue Origin. She began her time at Blue Origin running vibe testing, thermal and cryogenic testing, and proof/flow testing, then moved into final assembly and integration for the BE-4 rocket engines, where she supported hot fire testing at MSFC 4670. When she stumbled on an opportunity at Apex, she couldn’t turn it down, driving 2,000 miles from Alabama to California to join the team. Today, Amanda works as an Assembly, Integration & Test (AI&T) Technician supporting bus builds from base deck to finished, flight-ready spacecraft. Technicians like Amanda are the backbone of Apex’s mass-manufacturing strategy, executing the mechanical assembly, integration, and testing that transforms components into complete satellite platforms. Their work on the line is what ensures Apex hits rate, meets customer demand, and delivers mission success in orbit. Learn more about Amanda here: https://lnkd.in/gBhh65X9 Want to build flight hardware alongside Amanda and Apex’s team of highly skilled technicians? Check out our open production roles linked in the comments.

The recent Transporter-17 launch was a big day for Apex.  We put four Apex spacecraft into orbit: three customer-owned Aries platforms and one Apex-owned testbed Nova platform.  All three Aries spacecraft are operating nominally, and commissioning continues ahead of schedule. These buses represent a major milestone for our customers, who are using them to support critical missions. We’re excited to reveal more details on those missions in the coming months.    The Nova testbed platform performed as planned through its early mission: it separated cleanly from the launch vehicle, powered on, booted the flight computer, deployed both solar arrays successfully, and entered a GNC-controlled safe state before transitioning into a hold state, awaiting first contact. Unfortunately, we have not yet established communications with the test spacecraft. The Apex team is working to understand the issue and establish communications with Nova.  The very purpose of Nova’s pathfinder mission is to surface issues and prove out vehicle performance before our customer missions. Apex is already set to launch the second Nova testbed platform in the coming months, before flying any customer missions. This rapid mission cadence enables Apex’s risk-on approach for rapidly developing and testing pathfinder satellite platforms to ensure customer-owned platforms maintain 100% on-orbit success.  This is the Apex way: to develop new platforms at unprecedented speed, Apex intentionally accepts higher risk on initial self-funded flights of testbed vehicles to prove out design and performance. Once these systems fly successfully in orbit, our customers are ready to fly them with confidence. For our customers’ spacecraft, reliability is everything, and we treat it that way. The next Nova is already in production, with our launch coming up in just a matter of months. We will apply learnings from this first mission, make the necessary changes for increased reliability, and fly again before any Nova customer mission.  We are immensely proud of the Apex team for the three customer-owned Aries platforms now operating successfully in orbit, and thankful to our partners for their continued support. We will share more updates on all four spacecraft as we confirm additional information. (Thanks to our friends Vantor for the great NEI shots of Nova!)

What is a satellite platform, and why does it matter for the future of space? Apex Co-Founder & CEO Ian Cinnamon joined Suffiyan Malik on We The Builders at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute's National Economic Forum to dig into the thesis behind Apex, how productized platforms allow for faster, more scalable production – and what that means for Apex's customers. Full episode linked in the comments ⤵️

New pod alert: Apex CEO & Co-Founder Ian Cinnamon sat down with Mo Islam of Arkaea Media Group/Payload a few weeks back to unpack why the biggest bottleneck in space is no longer launch; it's the spacecraft itself. After Ian sold his first company to Palantir, he and now Co-Founder Maximilian Benassi saw the problem up close: rockets were getting cheaper and payloads more capable, but satellite buses were still being built as bespoke engineering projects. Apex's answer was simple in theory, incredibly difficult in practice: turn spacecraft into products. Four years in, Apex is delivering standardized platforms for critical commercial and national security missions, and making good on the promise to bring true productization to the satellite industry. In the episode, Ian digs into: – Why spacecraft should be products, not one-off programs – Whether the bus market is underbuilt or heading toward oversupply – How Apex approaches manufacturing, vertical integration, and scale – Why bigger satellites may make more sense in a world of cheap launch – The capital strategy behind Apex's rapid growth Full episode linked in the comments 🔗

Why is a satellite like a race car? Fortune's Allie Garfinkle has the answer in her recent piece on Apex’s partnership with Toyota Racing Development USA. Leveraging the same precision manufacturing practices used to craft world-class racing engines, TRD is helping Apex scale by mass-producing precision-machined parts for our Apex satellite platforms. “We have to think about manufacturing from the perspective of not just how we build something, but how we build it when we’re factoring in all the variables that matter—quality, speed of production, and affordability,” said Ian Cinnamon. “Too often we say, ‘Oh, we can build a bunch.’ Well, how long does it take? Or, ‘We can build them really cheap.’ Okay, but are they high-quality? We need to find the middle ground between those core elements. And if we can do that, the U.S. manufacturing base can really fall into its stride.” Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/gTVrRfGW

Apex is proud to supply its Nova platform to Loft Orbital, expanding their off-the-shelf portfolio for future customer missions requiring increased size, weight, and power (SWaP). These missions include proliferated, power-hungry national security applications such as advanced sensing, high-throughput communications, and missile warning/tracking. Under the agreement, Apex will deliver up to 10 Nova platforms, with the first scheduled for delivery later this year. Links to the full story in the comments 🔗

Our very first Nova platform is on the pad, waiting to make history. When the Nova development program began, we were a team of less than 100 — today, we're nearly 400-strong, building Aries vehicles at rate and scaling production of Nova as we speak. At Apex - Satellite Platforms, we do something pretty rare in this industry - we execute on what we say we're going to do. I don't believe in overpromising and underdelivering. We set an ambitious timeline to get Nova in space, and tonight we will hit it - that's a testament to who our team is and how dedicated they are to their craft. Together we are changing how satellite platforms are built and creating a company that will fundamentally transform the U.S. space industrial base. To every engineer, technician, operator, and builder who got us here: thank you. This is your launch. Go Nova! Go Apex!

Nova-1 is set to deploy from SpaceX's Transporter-17 just after midnight tonight. As the first Nova in orbit, Nova-1 will serve as a flying testbed, proving out the Nova platform architecture and the vertically integrated tech stack (power, avionics, solar, flight software) that will underpin all future Apex platforms. Nova mission success has been divided into three discrete phases, each with a clearly defined set of objectives that will help prove Nova’s readiness as a true constellation workhorse. – Phase 1 (Minimum Viable Product): Establish communications and confirm power-positivity. Platform is healthy in orbit. – Phase 2 (Crossing the Threshold): Continue platform commissioning. Power on payloads and downlink data. – Phase 3 (Fully Operational Space Platform): Complete platform commissioning. Begin Project Shadow commissioning and mission ops. – Pushing the Limit: Following Project Shadow, Apex will continue testing the limits of Nova’s performance on orbit. Stay tuned for more mission updates over the next several weeks.

At Apex - Satellite Platforms, we are proud to support America's most critical space programs ensuring safety and security for the next 250. Happy birthday, America.