Apex to launch first satellite in 2024

Small satellite manufacturer Apex will launch its first satellite next year as a demonstration of its capabilities as it prepares for large-scale production. Apex announced April 4 that its first Aries satellite will fly on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 rideshare mission, scheduled for launch no earlier than January 2024. The satellite mission, dubbed “Call to Adventure” by the company, will carry multiple payloads for a set of undisclosed customers. The mission is principally a technology demonstration for Apex, testing the performance of the 200-kilogram Aries satellite. “We want to be able to test out certain maneuvers and do some higher risk operations once we’re in space,” said Ian Cinnamon, chief executive of the company, in an interview. The customers, he said, are those interested in buying full spacecraft from Apex and have signed what he called “multimillion-dollar contracts” for the mission. “After our paying customers are done utilizing the spacecraft for their needs, we are able to use the spacecraft as an in-space testbed” and gain flight heritage on key subsystems before going into full-scale production. Apex announced in October its plans for mass manufacturing of small satellites, raising a $7.5 million seed round. The company added funding after that announcement, Cinnamon said, increasing it to $10 million. The company currently projects producing five Aries spacecraft in 2024, increasing to 20 in 2025 and 100 in 2026. The company’s goal is to produce a standardized bus that can be built in volume and support different customers without costly customization. “The whole mentality of our company is shifting to this productized approach where we’re not doing custom NRE [non-recurring engineering] for each end customer,” he said. “We’ve designed it such that we don’t have to change anything on the spacecraft if a different customer wants a different configuration package.”

Apex is developing the Aries satellite, weighing 200 kilograms including payload and fuel, that is designed to be mass-produced for a range of customers. Credit: Apex

Apex has not disclosed customers for the Aries satellite, but Cinnamon said the company has had talks with both government and commercial customers. Commercial interest, he said, includes using those satellites for imaging and communications as well as applications related to orbital transfer vehicles. Government customers, notably in national security, are interested in satellites that can be built rapidly.

The company has plans for two larger satellites: Nova, weighing 500 kilograms, and Comet, weighing 1,000 kilograms. Half the mass of those spacecraft, as well as the smaller Aries, is devoted to payload and fuel, with the other half the bus itself.

“Almost all of the interest in the market today is for that 200-kilogram vehicle,” he said, with some interest in the larger Nova bus. “The market is just not there right now for the vehicles larger than that, but over time I do believe it’ll start to get a little bit bigger.”

The biggest challenge for Apex’s plans, he said, is industry-wide supply chain problems. “There’s massive supply chain issues, and one of the things that is very important to us is understanding how we mitigate those supply chain issues very early on.”

To address those issues, the company has ordered components not just for the first Aries satellite but the next several it plans to construct. “Our whole mentality is to move faster,” he said. “Even ahead of securing the next several years of customers, we’re already purchasing those components and beginning production.”

We may have just seen the first comet from another solar system

The solar system may be hosting a visitor from the stars. A newly discovered comet is screaming away from Earth, and based on its weird orbital trajectory astronomers think it might be the first comet ever observed that came from interstellar space. A sky-surveying telescope in Hawaii spotted the fast-moving object, now called C/2017 U1, on 18 October, after its closest approach to the sun. During the next week, astronomers made 34 separate observations of the object and found it has a strange trajectory that is at an angle to the orbits of the planets and does not circle the sun. Now, astronomers are hoping more skywatchers will take a look and pin down whether it’s from our neighborhood or an interloper from beyond. Most comets follow ellipse-shaped orbits around the sun, swooping in from the distant Oort Cloud to kiss the inner solar system before heading back out again. This one, by contrast, will never return. Its orbital path suggests it sailed in from the direction of the constellation Lyra above the relatively flat plane of the solar system, looped around the sun, and is headed back out for eternity.

Lyra is near the direction the sun is moving within the Milky Way, says Luke Dones at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “That’s exactly what you’d expect; there should be more interstellar comets coming from the direction the sun is heading toward,” he says.
Just popping in

“It’s coming from very far away, but we can’t actually backtrack how far away it started. It could be that it’s coming from outside the solar system, but it’s really hard to tell,” says Simon Porter, also at the Southwest Research Institute. Further observations in the next couple weeks will make the picture clearer.

What’s more, a comet on such an extreme path doesn’t necessarily have to come from interstellar space. “It could have interacted with Jupiter or another planet in such a way that changed its orbit,” says Maria Womack at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The comet’s origins are hard to pin down in part because of the nature of comets. “When you think of photos of comets, they’re a fuzzy blob. People have to make determinations of where they think the center is. Someone who is at the telescope has to make a call,” Womack says.

This necessary guesswork makes the measurements less precise, so astronomers want lots of observations before they’ll be convinced the comet really is from beyond our solar system, she adds.

Luckily, there are plenty of opportunities left to take a peek. The comet should be visible in powerful telescopes for at least another couple weeks, allowing amateurs and professionals alike to survey the icy visitor and determine its history.