Terran Orbital expands production, supporting seven satellite buses

Terran Orbital has expanded its satellite manufacturing by officially opening a new 60,000 square feet facility in Irvine, California.

It will be able to double satellite production, says the company, increasing from an estimated 10 satellites per month to 20. The new space includes two advanced Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) lines, a testing facility equipped with a large shaker table and a Thermal Vacuum (TVAC) chamber, a wire harness facility, and new automated module testing facilities.

“This new addition will significantly improve both the efficiency and capacity of our entire production system,” said Marc Bell, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Terran Orbital.

Responsive Space

The company recently launched its “Responsive Space Initiative”, to deliver standard buses within 30 days, and complete satellite systems with integrated payloads in 60 days. The Irvine facility will be part of this initiative.

With seven satellite buses in the programme, the company says it is standardizing common components that can be stocked and interchanged depending on the bus configuration. It says it designs and manufactures 85% of all the modules and components that go into a bus.

The company writes:

“We will be partnering with best-of-breed payload suppliers to stock a wide range of payloads. This will allow us to fulfill any customer requirements, whether it’s Electro-Optical Imaging, Synthetic Aperture Radar, Communications, Hyperspectral, or any other payload with global demand.”

Satellite buses

The seven ITAR-compliant bus classes involved range from the largest, ‘Enterprise’, to the smallest, ‘Triumph’.

Using common building blocks, they allow for wet launch masses of 14 to 1000 kg. In the company’s own words these buses are described as follows:

The Enterprise is specifically targeted to those customers who want a flat packing design to allow up to 24 vehicles per launch. It comes standard with Optical Inter Satellite Link and has a large, flat deck optimized for communications and RF payloads.
The Ambassador features the largest deck allowable by the ESPA-Grande standard for rideshare payloads. We expect it to be our top offering for the DoD/Intel community, allowing a large payload and optional Type 1 encryption.
The Nebula is the commercialized version of the bus placed in orbit in last week’s SDA Transport Layer Tranche O launch in partnership with Lockheed Martin. It has an open deck plan to easily accommodate oddly shaped payloads with optional Type 1 encryption and can be configured for a 15-inch ESPA or 23-inch ESPA-Grande-capable launch vehicle.
The Excelsior is the smallest microsatellite in the product line, having the advantage of delivering higher power to payload than any of the nano models while still having the budget-friendly ability to launch two per ESPA port.
The Voyager is built with component redundancy to reduce risk and extend its lifetime in harsh environments beyond LEO. It has both GEO and Cislunar heritage and the radios are designed for compatibility with NASA’s Deep Space network.
The Renegade is a nanosatellite that can be configured as 12U or 16U for exceptionally long payloads and can accommodate up to a 19cm diameter optical imager. It has the best payload volume-to-bus ratio of the platforms, making it an economical solution for larger research missions.
The Triumph is the smallest platform in the Terran Orbital standard bus lineup. It has unparalleled spacecraft agility, and with the most flight heritage of all platforms, it exemplifies the smaller, cheaper, faster mentality.

“While we still offer fully custom platforms to meet unique specifications, we are creating new industry standards, and these standard platforms bring forth our vision to meet mission requirements at scale, drive down the cost of the satellite, and increase their functionality using standard components that roll up into configurations that quickly and effectively satisfy the needs of the DoD and research customer alike,” said said Marc Bell.

Terran is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, and is currently manufacturing 42 satellite buses on behalf of Lockheed Martin for the U.S. Space Development Agency’s Tranche 1 Transport Layer Program. This is a mesh network in low Earth orbit (LEO) that will support military operations as well as other satellites and constellations.

Images: Terran Orbital Corporation

See also: Safran, Terran sign MOA for U.S. satellite electric propulsion system