Lafayette-based aerospace company Blue Canyon Technologies on Wednesday unveiled its recently expanded “cubesat” factory in Boulder, which will eventually allow for the production of up to 85 small satellites per year.
Blue Canyon, a Raytheon Intelligence & Space (NYSE: RTX) subsidiary, doubled the manufacturing space at the Boulder factory, off Airport Road, to 31,000 square feet.
“This factory essentially allows us to consolidate our engineering and production operations for cubesats to meet the needs of our customers producing large constellations and doing it with increased operational efficiency above what we have been able to do,” said General Manager Jeff Watts.
The company produces “microsats” at its 80,000-square-foot Lafayette facility, which is also its headquarters and missions operations location.
The microsats are small satellites, from 22 to 200 pounds. The cubesats are satellites made up of cubic modules about 40 inches wide, weighing no more than 3 pounds — about the size of a loaf of bread. Blue Canyon’s Star Tracker is a camera that allows the satellite to know exactly where it is by looking to surrounding stars.
“Currently, we can support with the factory up to 50 cubesats per year. Improvements in efficiency gains will up that to about 85 cubesats per year,” said Cubesats Executive Director John Carvo.
Last month, company officials witnessed the launch of Slingshot 1, MISR-B and a government customer satellite, aboard Virgin Orbit.
Slingshot 1 is the “first-ever Blue Canyon 12U CubeSat bus carrying 19 payloads to low Earth orbit,” according to a news release. It was built for Aerospace Corporation and the mission is expected to demonstrate the accessibility of integrating numerous payloads into a single interface.
MISR-B is a 6U CubeSat bus, “which Blue Canyon provided along with the radio, GPS, reaction wheels, torque rods, sun sensors, solar arrays, batteries, Guidance Navigation & Control System and power management.” The program is intended to demonstrate “a robust, responsive, multi-mission CubeSat capability to satisfy a varied set of requirements and provides significantly more power to the payload.”
The cubesats can perform missions like studying hurricanes from low-Earth orbit, Carvo said. The company has 35 cubesats in orbit.
Blue Canyon has grown to 450 employees, with about 140 who were hired in the last seven months, Carvo said.
It was bought by Massachusetts-based Raytheon Technologies Corp. in 2020. Raytheon also bought Centennial-based SEAKR Engineering LLC, a space electronics provider, in 2021.
Watts said the “ecosystem” of Raytheon, Blue Canyon and SEAKR in Colorado will allow for “larger constellations of small satellites, provided on a tighter timeline, and allows us to provide all the needed mission requirements.”
