Blue Canyon Tech

LAFAYETTE, Colo., June 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — RTX’s (NYSE: RTX) small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider, Blue Canyon Technologies, was selected to build two 12U CubeSat buses for NASA’s PolSIR mission, which will study ice clouds that form at high altitudes throughout tropical and sub-tropical regions. In addition to designing and manufacturing the bus platforms, Blue Canyon will also provide mission operations services.

The PolSIR instrument –Polarized Submillimeter Ice-cloud Radiometer– will observe the full diurnal cycle of high-altitude ice clouds to improve climate forecasts and provide climate models with important insights on how Earth’s atmosphere will change in the future.

“Supporting this critical mission builds on our heritage of weather monitoring missions including TEMPEST-D and TROPICS,” said Chris Winslett, general manager of Blue Canyon Technologies.

Each spacecraft will be equipped with radiometers that will observe the clouds’ daily cycle of ice content through two separate wavelengths in two spectral bands and will fly in orbits separated by three to nine hours. Over time, these two instruments will observe the clouds’ daily cycle of ice content.

NASA Goddard will provide the project management team that builds the two instruments for the Principal Investigator led mission from Vanderbilt University, and science operations will be conducted by the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  For more information on the PolSIR mission, visit vanderbilt.edu/polsir. 

About Blue Canyon Technologies 
Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT), RTX’s small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider, offers a diverse portfolio of innovative, reliable, and affordable spacecraft and components that enable a broad range of missions and technological advancements for the new space economy. The company currently supports numerous unique missions with more than 140 cumulative spacecraft orders.  

About RTX
With more than 185,000 global employees, RTX pushes the limits of technology and science to redefine how we connect and protect our world. Through industry-leading businesses – Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon – we are advancing aviation, engineering integrated defense systems, and developing next-generation technology solutions and manufacturing to help global customers address their most critical challenges. The company, with 2023 sales of $69 billion, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. 

For questions or to schedule an interview, please contact corporatepr@rtx.com

SOURCE RTX

Twin CubeSats will improve Earth climate modeling

LAFAYETTE, Colo., June 6, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — RTX’s (NYSE: RTX) small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider, Blue Canyon Technologies, has established communication with both CubeSats for the NASA PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far InfraRed Experiment) mission. The PREFIRE mission will measure the amount of heat Earth emits into space from the Arctic and Antarctica.

Blue Canyon provided two heritage 6U CubeSats for the mission, which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. Analysis of PREFIRE’s measurements will inform climate and ice models, helping to improve projections of how a warming world will affect sea ice loss, ice sheet melt and sea level rise.

“Improving climate models can provide more accurate projections on the impacts of storm severity and frequency, as well as coastal erosion and flooding,” said Chris Winslett, general manager for Blue Canyon Technologies.

The PREFIRE project was jointly developed by NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. JPL provided the thermal infrared spectrometer payload, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will process the data collected by the instruments.

About Blue Canyon Technologies 
Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT), RTX’s small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider, offers a diverse portfolio of innovative, reliable, and affordable spacecraft and components that enable a broad range of missions and technological advancements for the new space economy. The company currently supports numerous unique missions with over 100 cumulative spacecraft orders.

About RTX
With more than 185,000 global employees, RTX pushes the limits of technology and science to redefine how we connect and protect our world. Through industry-leading businesses – Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon – we are advancing aviation, engineering integrated defense systems, and developing next-generation technology solutions and manufacturing to help global customers address their most critical challenges. The company, with 2023 sales of $69 billion, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

For questions or to schedule an interview, please contact corporatepr@rtx.com

SOURCE RTX

Two Colorado space companies are partnering on a mission to put a research lander on the far side of the moon in 2026 and send data back to Earth.

Denver-based iSpace USA Inc., a company making a lunar lander projected to launch in two years, hired Blue Canyon Technologies, a Lafayette-based subsidiary of defense giant RTX, also known as Raytheon (NYSE: RTX), to make the pair of communications microsatellites that will launch to the moon with iSpace’s Apex 1.0 lander and send large amounts of mission data to researchers.

The companies unveiled their partnership Tuesday at the Space Symposium, the large space and defense industry convention held in Colorado Springs.

The choice was a combination of BCT’s technical capabilities to make the satellites and the possibility of working in person with another Denver-area company on the project, said Ron Garan, CEO ofiSpace USA, the domestic subsidiary of Tokyo-based iSpace Inc.

“It was a perfect fit;’ said Garan, a former NASA astronaut. “They’ve got a really proven track record. They’re local. It’s a short drive to be able to collaborate, and in the power of face-to-face collaboration;’

iSpace USA started working on lander designs in Denver in 2020, establishing itself out of temporary space.

It has since moved its U.S. headquarters to offices near Centennial Airport and today employs more than 100 people.

The company hasn’t said how much is being invested in the Apex 1.0 mission.

NASA awarded the Draper project a Commercial Lunar Payload Services program grant of $73 million in 2022.

Last month, iSpace Inc., which is publicly traded in Japan, issued stock and raised $53.S million, the bulk of which the company says will fund Apex 1.0 lander development at its U.S. subsidiary.

BCT plans to build communications satellites that will ride to the moon with the lander but stay in orbit while Apex 1.0 is on the surface. The satellites will allow continuous data collection during the Apex 1.0 lander’s time on the far side of the moon, an area that today has no communications.

BCT will use its Venus satellite bodies and aims to provide near-continuous overhead connections for the lander.

“Being able to have that constant data flow back and forth at the moon, as opposed to small windows of time where you only get a little bit of data, is a really big deal;’ said Chris Winslett, general manager of BCT.

A successful Apex 1.0 mission should yield a lot of information that future lunar missions can use to establish a last presence on the moon, he said, which is the goal of NASA’s Artemis program.

“So, it’s very exciting for us to be a part of this mission;’ Winslett said.

BCT started in Boulder and was acquired in 2020 by RTX, then known as Raytheon Technologies Corp. It employs about 400 people locally between its Boulder cubesat and components production center and its Lafayette headquarters and satellite factory.

The Apex 1.0 mission is planned to last during a two-week lunar “day” on the far side of the moon but is not being designed to last through the dark and intense cold of the twoweek night, the company says.

iSpace’s Japanese parent company launched one lander to the moon a year ago which crashed on the surface, but it was considered a successful first mission. The company is sending another lander to the moon later this year.

The Draper lander iSpace USA is building is a different design, one that’s bigger and made in Denver.

It’s a roughly 10-foot-tall and 660-pound spacecraft iSpace is designing to carry NASA seismic measurement and soil temperature reading instruments, a robotic lunar rover made by iSpace in Luxembourg and other research payloads to the lunar surface.

The mission has attracted both commercial and government tenants who want space on the lander, the company says.

Apex 1.0 craft is targeting the Schrodinger Basin, the site of both an impact crater and a volcanic eruption on the moon that’s expected to have left behind evidence of the celestial body’s evolution.

The mission chose the region because so much about it is yet to be learned, and the far side of the moon – which isn’t always dark but never faces the Earth – hasn’t been the site of a U.S. lunar expedition, said Ryan Whitley, an iSpace vice president.

“There’s a first-mover advantage;’ he said. “There’s an incredible amount of scientific interest:’

The communications satellites that BCT is building for the mission aren’t the company’s first.

BCT built two communications satellites that circled Mars for two years starting at the end of 2018 and provided data links for NASA’s Insight lander on the surface. It was the first use in deep space of really small satellites, known as cubesats, and was a mission that has a lot in common with the iSpace Apex 1.0 project, BCT’s Winslett said.

The company also built components of eight cubesats that circled the moon. They were launched in 2022 with the test flight of NASA’s Orion capsule that lapped the moon.

By Greg Avery – Senior Reporter, Denver Business Journal, Apr 9, 2024 

The mission planned by the Air Force Research Laboratory will seek to demonstrate on-orbit maneuvering

WASHINGTON — Blue Canyon Technologies is preparing to deliver a spacecraft designed for the U.S. Air Force to demonstrate the capabilities of maneuverable satellites in deep space.

The company, a subsidiary of defense and aerospace contractor RTX, expects to soon complete production and testing of Oracle-M, an Air Force Research Laboratory experiment intended to fly beyond Earth’s orbit to test satellite mobility and navigation capabilities in the cislunar region of space. 

Oracle-M (Mobility) will be AFRL’s first cislunar space mission. The Air Force is looking to demonstrate orbital change maneuvers and navigation in that largely unknown environment.

Blue Canyon is building the satellite under a $14.6 million contract awarded in November 2021.

“We are currently targeting a late July 2024 timeframe for delivery to the customer,” said Chris Winslett, general manager for Blue Canyon Technologies.

A launch date has not yet been announced. Winslett said Oracle-M is now going through spacecraft-level integration testing. “We’re getting pretty close,” he said in a recent interview. 

Flight heritage for Saturn bus

Oracle-M will fly to geostationary Earth orbit and then travel into cislunar space. “We’re excited about this one because we’ll be using our platform to demonstrate propulsion technologies and improve maneuverability,” said Winslett.

“We see cislunar space as a key region where we’re gonna see more interest from various customers,” he added. 

Blue Canyon builds all its satellite components in house except for the propulsion systems, which it acquires from suppliers such as ExoTerra.

For the Oracle-M mission the company used its Saturn-class ESPA-Grande bus. These are one of the largest in the small-satellite category, about the size of a small washing machine. The company also used the Saturn bus for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Blackjack program. 

Four Blackjack satellites launched to low Earth orbit in June and are currently conducting experiments with optical inter-satellite links and autonomous on-orbit tasking software. 

DARPA has been able to communicate with all four satellites and verify that they’re operating correctly, said Winslett. Blackjack was a key project for the Saturn buses to acquire flight heritage in the space environment.

Blue Canyon anticipates more government contracts for the Saturn platform which, because of its size, is suitable for missions carrying advanced payloads for Earth observation, missile warning and secure communications. “Getting on-orbit heritage with that size bus is kind of opening up that market for us, for not only DoD, but other government customers on the civil side and the intelligence community.”

Winslett said the company is actively looking to partner with satellite manufacturers and defense contractors competing for military satellite orders from the Space Development Agency, a Space Force organization building a large constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit for communications, and for missile detection and tracking.

For more than a decade, RTX’s small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider, Blue Canyon Technologies’, high-precision, advanced solutions have disrupted the space industry by demonstrating how lower-cost smallsats serve as a complement to larger satellites in the commercial, science and defense sectors.

Now, the same can be said for the company’s components. By leveraging existing technology, Blue Canyon is bringing the final frontier a little closer to home.

Just 10 years ago, the capabilities of inexpensive smallsats were limited and tech demos were the typical posture. Today, we’re at an inflection point where significant investment and expectation is being put into constellations of high-performance operational smallsats. The capability and mission value multipliers offered by Control Moment Gyroscopes (CMG) are already becoming market differentiators and is expected to accelerate.

Previously reserved for larger, more traditional satellites, CMGs offer at least 10 times the torque of reaction wheels with up to five times less power. They provide a quantum leap in the speed with which a spacecraft can reorient and point in another direction, multiplying the return on investment for any mission limited by the responsiveness of its bus platform, especially Earth Observation (EO).

This advanced spacecraft agility, coupled with low jitter that maximizes the quality of mission data, allows CMGs to offer the performance needed to maximize payload-pointing operations while on-orbit.

Blue Canyon Technologie has delivered multiple sets of flight CMGs designed at a SWaP-C appropriate level for the smallsat market while maintaining the increased performance for which CMGs are known. Additionally, Blue Canyon stands ready to integrate CMGs into the firm’s standard product offerings to help customers achieve extreme agility and precision pointing.

Blue Canyon offers the CMG-12, which has 12-Newton-meter-second rotor momentum and 12Nm of output torque, and the CMG-8, featuring 8Nms of momentum and 8Nm of output torque. The CMG-12 is designed using a radiation-hardened parts paradigm with redundancy options to meet the risk tolerance and mission length needs of various markets.

The vibration and jitter isolation are integrated into each CMG, with the control electronics as a separate unit. CMGs provide long life, high-control accuracy, and low-induced vibration performance required for demanding precision-pointing missions.

To aid customers in harnessing this opportunity, Blue Canyon is integrating CMGs into its standard spacecraft platforms and turnkey guidance, navigation and control systems. These platforms provide increased performance, low-cost, high-reliability CMG-based solutions designed for high-volume production in response to space mission needs.

Founded in 2008, Blue Canyon built its reputation on flight-proven, reliable components, with nearly 300 sun sensors, 200 star trackers and 800-plus reaction wheels launched to date. With 70 spacecraft launched since its inception, Blue Canyon has an impressive flight heritage of 100 years on-orbit for spacecraft, 151 years for turnkey guidance and navigation systems and 3,100 years for components. 

The company’s components and bus platforms have completed missions ranging from Very-Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), LEO, GEO, Cislunar and an interplanetary journey. Equipped with dedicated facilities and staff for each business unit and in-house production resources, Blue Canyon continues to solve the toughest challenges in space with its high-performance solutions to support all types of missions regardless of size or scope.

Former Lockheed Martin executive Chris Winslett joins Raytheon’s small-satellite subsidiary amid efforts to expand the company’s footprint in defense programs

WASHINGTON — Chris Winslett for three years ran one of Lockheed Martin’s small-satellite business sectors, helping the company win major orders from the Space Development Agency for its low Earth orbit constellation.

Winslett last month was named general manager of Blue Canyon Technologies, a small-satellite manufacturer founded in 2008 and acquired by the defense contractor Raytheon Technologies in 2020. 

Growing Blue Canyon’s defense footprint is a key goal for Winslett, he told SpaceNews in a recent interview. The company is currently producing small satellites and cubesats mostly for NASA and commercial customers, and is pursuing orders from spacecraft manufacturers competing for Space Development Agency orders. 

“I think there’s enormous opportunities in defense, civil, on the intelligence side, as well as commercial space,” said Winslett. 

Based in Boulder, Colorado, Blue Canyon in 2018 won a high-profile military contract when it was selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to supply buses for the Blackjack technology demonstration in low Earth orbit.

The contract with DARPA had options to supply up to 20 buses. But the program was beset by delays and supply chain problems and was ultimately downsized to only four satellites, which launched to orbit in June. 

The Blackjack satellites were built with Blue Canyon’s largest satellite bus, the Saturn-class, ESPA-Grande. Although DARPA’s program didn’t generate as many orders as Blue Canyon had anticipated, these buses are now in increasing demand by other defense agencies, said Winslett. 

Raytheon is using Blue Canyon’s Saturn buses to build seven satellites for the Space Development Agency. The smallsat subsidiary, however, does not expect to supply exclusively to its parent company, and will be a merchant supplier of buses and other hardware to any manufacturer, Winslett said.

“SDA over the last three years has really disrupted the government market, buying satellites in a very short amount of time and at an affordable cost,” he said. “I think you’ll see a lot more government agencies move in that direction.”

Winslett said an “enormous amount of lessons were learned from the Blackjack program,” particularly about how to manage the supply chain.

An industry-wide shortage of parts and components, aggravated by the covid pandemic, resulted in Blackjack delays and also affected Space Development Agency programs. 

As a result, Raytheon and Blue Canyon started a new effort, called Project Sunrise, to ensure supply shortages are averted in the future, said Winslett. The program puts greater focus on inventories and ensuring key parts are always available. “It’s going to help us really shorten our cycle times,” he added. “Our customers are looking at building capabilities quickly, probably much faster than has historically been done.”

More demand for cubesats

Although defense customers like SDA and other satellite operators are interested in the larger sized smallsats, there is still a significant demand for tiny cubesats used primarily for experiments. 

In response, Blue Canyon last year opened an expanded cubesat factory in Boulder, increasing capacity from 50 to 85 a year. The company also operates a manufacturing facility in Lafayette, Colorado. 

To accommodate larger payloads on cubesats, Blue Canyon introduced a bigger 16U cubesat, named XB16.

“We are in discussion with various customers regarding the XB16,” said Winslett.

“We continue to see a large demand for cubesats, especially in the 12U to 16U size,” he said. Many customers are moving toward larger microsats, he added, “but I don’t think you’ll see cubesats go away. I actually think there’s still a large market for that.”

There are more manufacturers today supplying small satellites, Winslett said, “but the pie is continuing to grow. If you look at the market today versus three or five years ago, it’s substantially bigger,” he added. “It’s a competitive market, but I do think there’s opportunities for all of us.”

Upcoming deliveries

Winslett said Blue Canyon has recently delivered 11 smallsats for various government customers.

The company supplied satellites for several missions that are projected to launch in the near future. 

MethaneSAT, projected to launch in 2024, was built on a Saturn-class microsat. The Environmental Defense Fund will use it to measure methane emissions.

NASA’s Pandora mission, projected to launch in 2024 or 025, uses a Saturn-class microsat. NASA and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory designed the mission to study the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Blue Canyon also supplied cubesats for NASA’s CLICK B/C mission, projected to launch in 2024, designed to demonstrate optical communication crosslink between two small spacecraft in LEO. It also built cubesats for the upcoming VISORS telescope demonstration mission planned by NASA and other partners, and the EZIE mission funded by NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab to image the Earth’s magnetic footprint.