WASHINGTON — Satellite manufacturer Apex has won a contract from a Japanese company to provide a spacecraft bus for a technology demonstration mission.
Apex announced March 19 that it secured a contract from NEC to provide an Aries satellite bus for a mission launching in 2027. The spacecraft, operating in low Earth orbit at an altitude of 1,000 kilometers, will test optical communications technology for future satellite constellations.
“By fusing NEC’s long-standing expertise in advanced mission payload design with Apex’s standardized, innovative platform, we will redefine the speed of development, from planning to launch,” Yasushi Yokoyama, general manager of the satellite constellation department at NEC, said in a statement.
The order is the first Apex has announced with a Japanese customer and is part of an effort by the company to broaden the market for its standardized satellite buses.
“I’m a big believer that if you’re building the right product, that should really hit a global market,” Ian Cinnamon, chief executive of Apex, said in an interview. “We’ve always been exploring the global market.”
Japan has been one area of emphasis, he noted, because of its growing space and defense spending.
“NEC specifically has been a company that I think has always been on the forefront of innovation, always looking to move fast and push the limits on what’s possible,” he said. “So it was a natural fit.”
He said that while there has been “exponentially increasing” interest in Apex’s satellites from U.S. customers, such as for the Space Development Agency and potential applications in the Golden Dome missile defense initiative, there is also growing demand from both government and commercial customers outside the United States.
“I would say the core of the demand still comes from the U.S. market, specifically on the U.S. government side, but we continue to be a dual-use company that works internationally,” he said. “The number of international flights I take per year has been increasing, not decreasing.”
The contract with NEC is for a single Aries bus, which Cinnamon said will be a standard version taken off the company’s assembly line. He suggested, though, that it could lead to a larger order from NEC if this initial technology demonstration mission goes well. NEC has awards from the Japanese government, including the Space Strategy Fund administered by the Japanese space agency JAXA, to study technologies for a satellite constellation using optical communications.
“NEC has some incredibly grand aspirations about where they want to take things,” he said. “We see a lot of alignment between Apex’s goals of supplying multiple systems of these with their plans as well.”
Apex is scaling up production of both the Aries bus and the larger Nova and Comet buses at its Los Angeles factory. Cinnamon said the factory should produce a couple dozen satellites this year as the company ramps up production, with an ultimate capacity of more than 200 per year.
“We’re shipping buses off to customers on a weekly or monthly basis. We’re continuing to really hit that stride on the manufacturing side,” he said.
At the same time, he said orders for those satellites are growing. One thing the company has wanted to do is produce additional spacecraft to put into storage, offering them to customers with urgent demand.
“But we keep selling the ones that we’re trying to put on the shelf,” he said.