Satellite manufacturing startup Apex <\/b>introduced a new satellite bus offering called Comet, as the largest bus in its lineup, geared toward commercial constellations and national security architectures like the Golden Dome. <\/p>\n
Apex CEO and co-founder Ian Cinnamon told Via Satellite<\/i> the company developed Comet after seeing a lot of demand for novel communications constellations in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO). Comet is designed to offer more than 5 kilowatts of power to close certain link budgets, with the mass and design to pack \u201cas many as possible\u201d into a standard 5-meter fairing for launch. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhether it\u2019s IoT or backhaul or direct-to-device, we\u2019re seeing a lot of interest there. You need a system that the full economics of that commercial offering make sense,\u201d Cinnamon said. \u201cComet is able to take a lot of what we\u2019ve learned across Aries and Nova, to find this middle ground where we\u2019re reusing [many] of the core avionics and flight systems, but able to do it at a very reduced price point to really make the budget close for people.\u201d <\/p>\n
Cinnamon characterized the price for a Comet bus in the \u201cmid single-digit millions.\u201d <\/p>\n
Apex, based in Los Angeles, recently raised a $200 million Series C round. The company also offers the Aries bus, which is ESPA-class, and Nova, in the ESPA Grande size. The first Aries satellite passed one year in orbit in March 2025.<\/p>\n
While Comet was initially designed with commercial constellations in mind, Cinnamon also sees opportunity for it to meet the needs of national security architectures like the Golden Dome. <\/p>\n
\u201cOnce Golden Dome started to get a lot of traction, I think people started to realize this idea of a low cost, huge platform in orbit is something that\u2019s really interesting for carrying things like space-based interceptors,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you look at Comet, the idea of it being this huge platform with an open back is a really good fit for something to carry a bunch of high Delta V systems that could then be deployed from it to intercept targets.\u201d <\/p>\n
A number of manufacturers are rolling out satellite offerings for the constellation market. Rocket Lab, for example, recently debuted the \u201cFlatellite\u201d platform geared toward large-scale constellations. Flatellite is designed to launch on Neutron, and Rocket Lab said the offering is a move toward the company potentially operating its own constellation. <\/p>\n
Cinnamon believes the constellation manufacturing market has room for a number of players, and emphasized that Apex operates as a neutral bus provider. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t compete with our customers. We remain very neutral. It\u2019s very easy for people to be able to work with us without that threat of competing,\u201d Cinnamon said. \u201cIf we can be that neutral body, I think it\u2019s going to be reassuring to the market. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Satellite manufacturing startup Apex introduced a new satellite bus offering called Comet, as the largest bus in its lineup, geared toward commercial constellations and national security architectures like the Golden Dome. Apex CEO and co-founder Ian Cinnamon told Via Satellite the company developed Comet after seeing a lot of demand for novel communications constellations in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49092"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}