Scottish small satellite maker Clyde Space has created a US subsidiary with a view to setting up a manufacturing base in the country as demand for cubesats continues to grow at home and abroad.
Scottish small satellite maker Clyde Space has created a US subsidiary with a view to setting up a manufacturing base in the country as demand for cubesats continues to grow at home and abroad.
The private equity-backed group also revealed plans to expand its clean room in Scotland by 2.5k square feet, as it aims to rapidly accelerate production in the next 12-18 months.
“Many reports talk about the growth of the small satellite market,” CEO Craig Clark said in an interview with SatelliteFinance.
“I can say that this is not just talk as we are currently seeing an average of four spacecraft per month being produced in our cleanroom and we are ramping this up to eight spacecraft per month over the coming year.”
He said there are “huge opportunities” in the commercial and defence sectors in the US, where it already generates about 40% of its business through the supply of sub-systems to organisations such as data firm Spire, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NASA and the US Air Force.
Its first international subsidiary will initially focus on developing sales in the US before replicating its manufacturing base in Glasgow, where its workforce has doubled to around 75 in just over a year.
Clark also announced yesterday that revenue this year to date is already exceeding the total income of last year, with turnover to the end of April 2016 set to be US$8m, a five-fold increase over three years.
Clyde is backed by private equity firms Coralinn and Nevis Capital. The manufacturer’s recruitment drive to date has been partly funded by Scottish Enterprise, Scotland’s main economic development agency.
According to Clark, surging demand for smallsats is being driven by a step change in key technologies, such as increasingly sophisticated communications and power capabilities.
“Three years ago the cutting edge data downlink speed was in the region of 2-5Mbps, today we are looking at 40-100Mbps and in the next couple of years we could be seeing up to 2.5Gbps from optical downlinks on a cubesat,” he said.
Its recent contract wins include a £1m (US$1.44m) deal to build three cubesats for US broadcaster Outernet in an international partnership funded by the UK Space Agency, and an order from the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy.
Larger satellite manufacturers such as US-based Space Systems Loral, which focuses on the GEO communications market, have also been broadening their capabilities to tap into the soaring popularity of smallsats.
SSL, owned by Canada’s MDA, said on 28 January that it had been awarded a contract by an undisclosed customer to build six satellites for a LEO-based Earth imaging constellation.
“Our new manufacturing facility dedicated to small satellite production allows customers to harness the capabilities of commercial practices,” said SSL president John Celli in a brief statement.
In 2014, Earth observation startup Skybox Imaging to build 13 smaller LEO satellites a few months before Google bought it for US$500m. It was the first time Skybox outsourced satellite construction, after building its first two birds itself, SkySat-1 and SkySat-2.
