Image taken from the first Anduril-Apex joint mission launched aboard SpaceX Transporter-10. Photo: Anduril

Anduril Industries is teaming with Los Angeles-based Apex to help bring Anduril’s philosophy of mass produced, high tech aircraft, ships, and land systems to space.

“We recognize as a company that space has a deep mission need,” said Gokul Subramanian, senior vice president of space and software programs at Anduril. “We rely on space for nearly every single thing that the U.S. military fields, and protecting our assets in space has now become critically important. Obviously, many of the details are classified, but you can read on the news what our adversaries are doing in that domain, and the number of systems they are launching is growing exponentially.”

Anduril’s “focus is replicating those same things that we’ve done in other domains—moving from low volume, high cost systems — which is what traditionally is fielded — to high volume, low-cost systems,” he said.

“In order to succeed in this [space] domain, we must move to high volume, low cost,” Subramanian said. “We do that through three things – designing these systems to be manufactured at scale quickly, not boutique, bespoke components that are hard to source, hard to manufacture; a focus on autonomy and software; off-the-shelf components that can be rapidly assembled and composed to answer the mission need.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 lofted Apex’s first Aries SN1 small satellite into orbit on March 4. Apex said that it designed and launched the satellite in a year. Several defense companies, including Booz Allen Hamilton, made payloads for Aries SN1, and while Apex had not disclosed the other firms, Subramanian acknowledged that an Anduril payload, built in three months, was on Aries SN1.

Ian Cinnamon, the co-founder and CEO of Apex, said that the SN1 payloads include those for space domain awareness and Anduril’s edge computing payload.

“Aries, an ESPA-class 100kg bus, can support payloads up to 100kg,” Apex said. “These buses are manufactured at scale and can be configured with various performance packages, enabling Apex customers to leverage the benefits of serial production for diverse mission needs.”

This month, Apex said that it will start delivering Nova, an ESPA-Grande class satellite bus that can host payloads from 200 to 500 kilograms, next year. Apex has said that Nova may see use for the U.S. Space Force Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture and classified programs.

This story was first published by Defense Daily