Anduril is expanding further towards the ‘ultimate heights’.
The company, best known for its AI-powered defense products spanning air, land, and sea, is partnering with satellite bus manufacturing startup Apex Space to rapidly deploy payloads into orbit for the U.S. Department of Defense.
It’s rare for a growing defense company to choose to work with a supplier rather than build the product itself or simply acquire the supplier outright. But partnerships make a lot of sense. Anduril owes much of its success to its product design and development approach, which emphasizes rapid development of high-volume products using off-the-shelf components to reduce costs. Apex is doing something similar by productizing a satellite bus that is part of a spacecraft that hosts the payload. This has historically been influenced by custom engineering processes, long lead times and high prices.
“Our focus is to really replicate the same work that we have done in other areas, namely the space domain,” Gokul Subramanian, SVP of Space and Software at Anduril, said in a media briefing. “If you think about what Anduril has successfully done in the maritime, air domain, and land domain, we are moving from the low-capacity, high-cost systems that have been traditionally deployed to high-capacity, low-cost systems. “This is the same belief we have in space, where success requires a shift to high volume and low cost.”
Ian Cinnamon, co-founder and CEO of Apex Space, said satellite buses are the “biggest bottleneck” in the space ecosystem that is preventing the U.S. from putting more mass into orbit. Their goal is to deliver satellite buses to customers in weeks rather than years, with more transparent pricing and standardized products.
The Anduril-built payload flew on Apex’s first mission last March, which Subramanian called a “mission data processor” that enables processing of orbital data from images captured by the satellite. The payload uses Lattice, a command and control process deployed across Anduril products. Overall, Anduril was able to demonstrate, fully autonomously, the ability to point a spacecraft to a specific location, take images of what the spacecraft sees, process those images, and downlink the data on Earth.
“That was the first experiment that led us to have confidence in our vision for space and our partnership with Ian, the bus platform they built,” he said.
Anduril has already purchased a dedicated satellite bus from Apex, which will be launched next year. Anduril will operate systems carrying payloads built internally and by other vendors. Both executives explained that this will be the model moving forward. While Apex will provide the buses, Anduril will “missionize the system,” Subramanian said.
Subramanian declined to comment on the specific opportunities the company hopes to pursue through this new partnership, but it puts the company in a good position to serve as prime contractor on certain desirable contracts. For example, the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture program is deploying a large number of satellites to upgrade the Space Force’s aging missile tracking and defense architecture. SDA is spending huge sums for these satellites. So far, companies including Sierra Space, Rocket Lab and SpaceX have signed contracts to build satellites for the program. Anduril no doubt hopes to join the club.
This isn’t Anduril’s first foray into the space realm. The company signed a $10.50 contract with Space Systems Command in July 2023 to deploy Lattice on Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors used to provide early missile warning. Also last week, the company received a $25.3 million contract from the Space Force to provide additional upgrades to the SSN.
This is the first partnership with many that Anduril plans to announce, including other bus suppliers, Subramanian added.
