Blue Canyon’s Saturn-class microsat bus will help detect methane gas leaks across the globe. Watch as we deliver the completed bus for payload integration.
CBS on MethaneSat Mission [Video]
BCT’s Saturn-class Microsat Bus will help detect methane gas leaks.
Scientists build satellite to monitor methane leaks that contribute to global warming.
KOAA Interview at 37th Space Symposium [Video]
BCT’s Director of Engineering discusses satellite affordability and innovation to make space more accessible.
RTX provides Blue Canyon satellite to help solve a crucial climate challenge
LAFAYETTE, Colo., April 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Blue Canyon Technologies, RTX’s (NYSE: RTX) small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider, announced the successful launch and initial contact with the MethaneSAT satellite. MethaneSAT is the first satellite funded by a nonprofit organization to accelerate more effective efforts to reduce emissions of methane, a greenhouse pollutant responsible for about 30 percent of today’s global warming.
Blue Canyon provided its largest small satellite platform, the Saturn-class bus, integrated with infrared spectrometers that will be used to detect the colorless and odorless gas methane. This is the fifth Blue Canyon Saturn-class platform to launch and operate on-orbit successfully. Blue Canyon’s platform offers robust power systems, secure data handling and industry-leading guidance and navigation with a 200-kg payload capacity.
“Blue Canyon Technologies’ proven technical solutions will support this critical mission for the future of our planet and the continued exploration of Earth sciences,” said Chris Winslett, general manager for Blue Canyon Technologies.
MethaneSAT LLC, the organization behind the satellite, is a subsidiary of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. The donor-funded mission will provide global, high-resolution detection and quantification of methane emissions.
“MethaneSAT is a unique and demanding mission that will provide essential data we believe no other satellite can provide,” said Dr. Steven Hamburg, MethaneSAT Executive Manager and Project Lead. “Blue Canyon Technologies was selected as a best-in-class bus provider and has been a critical partner in bringing this project to fruition.”
Research says that cutting methane emissions from fossil fuel operations, agriculture and other sectors as quickly as possible using existing solutions could slow the rate of warming by as much as 30 percent, which is critically important while working to decarbonize the energy system. Data from MethaneSAT, the most advanced methane tracking satellite in space, will help policymakers and industry find and fix the problem faster and more effectively.
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
Colorado companies team up on mission to the far side of the moon
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
Blue Canyon to deliver spacecraft for U.S. Air Force cislunar mission
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.
Control moment gyroscopes deliver a quantum leap in smallsat capabilities
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.
What sets Colorado’s Front Range apart from other space hubs?
The region has been instrumental to some of the biggest aerospace projects of the millenium, including bringing humans to the moon and Mars.
As America aims to send humans back to the moon and astronauts potentially go to Mars for the first time, Colorado — with its cluster of talent and growing constellation of space companies — is fast becoming an essential hub to making those missions a reality.
Consider this: Not only is the spacecraft that will hold deep-space astronauts being developed and tested in the metro Denver area, so is the lunar rover that they’ll use.
Colorado is one of the top beneficiaries of the Artemis Moon to Mars project, which is expected to be a major economic boon to the country’s space industry that’s already getting a big boost from the rise of commercial spaceflight. NASA contracted more than 90 companies in Colorado to work on Artemis.
The Moon to Mars missions are expected to support 14,600 jobs in Colorado (second-highest nationwide) and $3 billion in economic output (third-highest), according to a 2022 NASA report.
Indeed, the region has been instrumental in other major aerospace projects.
Local companies have been part of the development of the James Webb Telescope, of tracking Russia’s war against Ukraine with satellite images, of launching methane-detecting sensors and of supporting Amazon’s project to create a constellation of satellites to bring internet to underserved areas.
Colorado space industry’s ‘geographic density’
Florida is famous for its rocket launches. Houston — of “we have a problem” fame — is a center for engineering and mission control. Then there’s Los Angeles, a growing hub for space startups.
So, what about in Colorado?
“Denver actually has a great cross section of all of them,” said Morgan Alu, the head of the Colorado Space Coalition, an affiliate of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp.
Colorado boasts of the second-largest space economy in the nation, after California, due to its central location, closer elevation to the atmosphere and leading science universities and military bases, including the headquarters of U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs.
The industry is primarily concentrated around the metro Denver area and the Front Range, which the group sees as operations spanning from the Wyoming border to Colorado Springs and El Paso County.
Colorado Springs is known for satellite operations and debris tracking, services that provide the traffic control of space, while Denver is home to the manufacturing and engineering of satellites and spacecraft that will be sent to Florida’s launch sites.
Top space and defense contractors — such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Maxar and Northrop Grumman — developed large campuses in the region. There’s mission control centers and a growing startup scene, Alu said.
More than 60% of aerospace companies in metro Denver have less than 10 employees, according to the Colorado Space Coalition. Nearly 9% have more than 250 workers.
The organization expects startups will continue coming to Colorado, Alu said, as companies want access to top talent and lower operating costs compared to coastal regions.
Another huge draw is that most space companies and labs are within an hour or so of each other, Alu added, making it easier for collaboration between the industry’s titans and startups to win large NASA or U.S. Department of Defense contracts together.
“We have a geographic density that sets the Colorado Front Range apart from our competitors states,” Alu said.
‘Event of the year’
And during one week each year, many are mere minutes from each other.
The industry comes together in Colorado Springs for the Space Symposium, an annual trade show hosted by nonprofit Space Foundation, where top government agencies, space companies, researchers, think tanks and U.S. and international officials discuss their latest initiatives and the biggest trends affecting the industry.
This year, it will run from Monday through Thursday at The Broadmoor Hotel.
Visit Colorado Springs said the event, founded in 1984, brought about $16 million in economic activity to the area last year from visitors staying in local hotels or dining out.
The event attracts more than 1,500 companies to Colorado and 12,000 people from 40 countries are expected to attend, said Space Foundation spokesman Rich Cooper.
Space Foundation is a nonprofit advocacy group for education and collaboration for the global space industry and is headquartered in Colorado Springs, where it hosts the conference each year.
“Space Symposium is the event of the year,” said Amanda Sammartino, spokesperson for Lafayette-based Blue Canyon Technologies, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies since 2020.
The show’s highlights include navigating the funding climate for space companies, artificial intelligence, nuclear power in Lower Earth Orbit, manufacturing on the moon, tackling satellite debris and military use.
“We are really looking forward to connecting with local, as well as national and international partners, and not only showcasing the products and solutions that we offer, but also learning from them,” Sammartino said.
The event will have new competition with the Space Force Association launching the Spacepower Conference in Orlando this December.
Space Foundation CEO Heather Pringle said the conferences will play a different role with the new event focused more on junior Space Force guardians looking to be inspired by space defense, while Space Symposium is more big picture and has more international partners.
“I see us as very complimentary,” Pringle said.
A need for collaboration
Colorado is a “regional hotbed” for the industry, Sammartino said, and a place for companies to share their best technologies to develop important space instruments. That collaboration is palpable in the region.
Consider Blue Canyon, which was acquired in 2020 by Raytheon, which wanted to build up small satellite production and looked to the Lafayette-startup founded in 2008.
“In addition to us having more support, they (Raytheon) can also have that specialization, that niche product line, within their offering,” Sammartino said. The subsidiary has two factories in Boulder and employs more than 400 people.
Blue Canyon Technologies collaborated with the former Ball Aerospace — renamed to Space and Mission Systems after defense manufacturer BAE Systems acquired the Colorado aerospace giant for nearly $5.6 billion — to develop a methane-detecting satellite.
Blue Canyon developed the body of the MethaneSat as Westminster-based Space and Mission Systems worked on the technological cargo for the advocacy nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. The satellite launched in March to trace methane emissions around the world.
Meanwhile, one of the largest space and defense contractors, Lockheed Martin has nearly tripled its employee count in Colorado over the last decade, said the company’s vice president and general manager of national security space Maria Demaree.
“Just the amount of the military space components that are here, the commercial and the academic just all together really makes it a great place to be in this industry,” said Demaree.
NASA contracted the Maryland-based company to build the Orion spacecraft, part of the Artemis program, set to bring humans back to the moon and potentially Mars. Most of Orion’s development and testing is done at Lockheed Martin’s Waterton Canyon campus in Littleton.
“It’s going to just further the crazy excitement around the space industry that we already have, right? That it’s for everyone,” Demaree said. “The problems that we are trying to solve are going to require diverse approaches and diverse thinking.”
Lockheed Martin employs more than 10,000 people in Colorado. The company first came to Denver in 1956, when the U.S. Air Force wanted to build an inland rocket facility safe from submarine attacks. In addition to its Waterton Canyon campus, it has offices in Denver, Aurora, Highlands Ranch and Colorado Springs.
“We specifically chose this Denver metropolitan area back in the 50s because of the stability of the rock formations for some of the sensitive testing facilities that we would need to build,” Demaree said. “So, that’s what originally brought us here, but it’s just continued over time to be a growth area.”
The market’s growth also means more opportunities, Demaree said. The area has seen an influx of companies come in with skill sets Lockheed Martin would partner with to tackle industry problems such as satellite congestion.
“That’s been a big part of the solution is watching the increasing number of entrants into this market that had not been there a couple decades ago,” Demaree said.
“We’re out looking at all those companies and seeing where we can bring those into our system,” she added.
One example would be developing a software to change satellite mission courses from the ground or using artificial intelligence to make the spacecraft less reliant on human supervision.
And at events like Colorado’s Space Symposium, company officials can learn about new projects in development and find the “best of breed,” plus show off their own achievements to potential partners and customers, Demaree said.
Colorado’s ‘center of gravity’
Colorado is gaining traction in the aerospace industry and is gaining an advantage over traditional hubs, said Alu from the state’s space coalition.
It remains home to U.S. Space Command, a hard fought battle that culminated in the decision last July. That long-awaited decision had capped more than two years of wrangling by officials from both Colorado and Alabama after former President Donald Trump announced in the final days of his administration that the command’s headquarters would move to Alabama.
While tech companies are struggling with finding funding, investment is booming for space startups, helping Colorado further cultivate its environment.
Then there’s the region’s universities, a significant talent pipeline that the the space coalition calls the “center of gravity” for the aerospace workforce.
Aerospace employment in the state has grown 32.5% in five years to nearly 37,000 employees, according to the group’s 2023 report, and the industry has had a $12.7 billion economic impact.
These new jobs pay far above the average Colorado salary at about $135,000.
“There’s been a lot of news coming out of Colorado and it’s largely being seen worldwide as an amazing place to work and play and have your business and move your employees,” Alu said. “We’ve also gotten better at marketing ourselves.”
And the state is also gaining global attention.
Alu said this year’s Space Symposium will be full of meetings with international delegations.
“There’s a significant presence this year coming to the Symposium and we’ve seen that number rise over the last two-to-three years,” Alu said. “So, we’re excited to be with our international partners and talk about why Colorado is a great place for them to establish their US operations.”
Colorado Spring Gazette military reporter Mary Shinn contributed to this report.
RTX completes milestones on DARPA Blackjack Program with four Blue Canyon Technologies satellites
Connected satellites in low-Earth orbit to support national security
LAFAYETTE, Colo., Jan. 30, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — RTX’s (NYSE: RTX) small-satellite manufacturer and mission services provider, Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT), announced today the satellites supporting the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Blackjack program have completed critical milestones activities.
National security space assets, critical to U.S. warfighting capabilities, traditionally reside in a geosynchronous orbit to deliver persistent overhead access to any point on the globe. To potentially replace these large systems, the Blackjack program seeks to establish an equally effective network in low-Earth orbit using a constellation of four connected satellites.
“The Blackjack program is a perfect example of how RTX and Blue Canyon Technologies are working to solve the hardest problems in aerospace and defense,” said Chris Winslett, general manager for Blue Canyon Technologies.
The successful operation marks a significant achievement for BCT in the swift commissioning of multiple spacecraft. This paves the way for global high-speed networks in LEO orbit and a continued growth of commoditized small satellite buses for LEO constellations and beyond.
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
RTX is the world’s largest aerospace and defense company. With more than 185,000 global employees, we push 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 for operational success, and developing next-generation technology solutions and manufacturing to help global customers address their most critical challenges. The company, with 2023 sales of $68.9 billion, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.
For questions or to schedule an interview, please contact corporatepr@rtx.com.
SpaceNews – New head of smallsat supplier Blue Canyon sets sights on defense market growth
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.
RTX Provides Blue Canyon Satellites for NASA Swarm Test Launch
RTX’s (NYSE: RTX) small-satellite manufacturer and mission services provider Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT), announces successful launch and initial contact with CubeSats for the NASA Starling mission, a technology demonstration aimed at proving the success of cooperative groups of spacecraft operating in an autonomous, synchronous manner or “swarm.”
BCT provided four 6U CubeSats to NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program which is managed by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley for the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. The Starling mission is advancing the readiness of various technologies for cooperative groups of spacecraft by demonstrating technologies to enable multipoint science data collection by several small spacecraft flying together. The six-month mission will specifically test onboard swarm maneuver planning and execution, communications networking, relative navigation, and autonomous coordination between satellites.
“We continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible,” said John Carvo, Executive Director of CubeSats at BCT. “By providing heritage hardware for a demonstration such as this, we’re continually optimizing low-costs and quick turns for small constellation programs.”
The satellites will be positioned in a nearly sun-synchronous, low-Earth orbit, with all four spacecraft actively engaged in the experiment.
BCT delivered the first satellite for the mission in 2021. In addition to manufacturing the satellites, BCT is providing operations support for the Starling mission, named after the bird famous for flying in a synchronous or “swarm” formation. Work on this program was performed in Lafayette, Colorado.
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
RTX is the world’s largest aerospace and defense company. With more than 180,000 global employees, we push 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 for operational success, and developing next-generation technology solutions and manufacturing to help global customers address their most critical challenges. The company, with 2022 sales of $67 billion, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.
Media Contact:
Amanda Sammartino
Phone: 720-921-0802
Email: asammmartino@bluecanyontech.com
RTX Introduces Largest Form Factor in CubeSat Product Line
RTX’s (NYSE: RTX) small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider, Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT), continues to meet the demand for increased payload size, weight, and power (SWaP) by introducing the XB16 CubeSat, now the largest form factor in its CubeSat product line.
The XB16 CubeSat offers 14U of payload volume with a cannister-dependent option for an additional 12,000 cubic centimeters of volume, all while maintaining BCT’s robust power systems, secure data handling, resilient performance, and ultra-precise attitude control systems. The larger payload volume capacity of the XB16 provides an ideal solution for remote sensing, earth observation, and in-space communications.
“Our flight-proven products are known for their fine-pointing and agility on orbit,” said John Carvo, executive director of CubeSats at Blue Canyon. “Now we are able to offer a larger payload volume with the same high level of accuracy and orbit lifetime.”
This addition to the BCT array of peak-performance and cost-effective spacecraft solutions continues the company’s ability to support all types of academic, commercial and government space missions.
The new XB16 will be developed at BCT’s Spacecraft Manufacturing Center located in Boulder, CO. The office and laboratories are designed specifically for high-volume production of spacecraft systems and components, with the manufacturing capability to handle large constellations of small spacecraft.
About Blue Canyon Technologies
Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT), RTX’s small-satellite manufacture 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
RTX is the world’s largest aerospace and defense company. With more than 180,000 global employees, we push 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 for operational success, and developing next-generation technology solutions and manufacturing to help global customers address their most critical challenges. The company, with 2022 sales of $67 billion, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.
Blue Canyon Technologies Provides Defense-Critical Small Satellites on Transporter-8 Launch
Small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider Blue Canyon Technologies, a subsidiary of RTX (NYSE: RTX), announced today its contributions to the recent Transporter-8 launch by SpaceX on June 12, kickstarting several defense-critical missions.
Blue Canyon’s products on the Transporter-8 launch included four Saturn-class microsatellites for DARPA’s Blackjack mission, two 6U CubeSats for the Department of Defense (DoD) Modular ISR program (MISR) and one 12U CubeSat for a government customer.
“Blue Canyon’s product line of smallsat buses provide the proven performance and heritage needed to support these critical defense missions,” said Jeff Watts, general manager of Blue Canyon Technologies. “Our ability to also manufacture most of the components and subsystems for the spacecraft are what sets us apart within the industry.”
DARPA’s Blackjack mission aims to lay the groundwork for a high-speed global network in low-Earth orbit. This network will provide the DoD with connected, resilient, and persistent coverage. Each Blackjack satellite has a Pit Boss data processing node and a Storm King radio-frequency payload made by SEAKR Engineering, also a RTX subsidiary.
The MISR program is intended to demonstrate a robust, responsive, multi-mission CubeSat capability to satisfy various requirements. The pair of MISR CubeSats are the start in a series of missions to demonstrate various capabilities and mission effectiveness.
All seven spacecraft are in good working order and performing as expected following the launch. Commissioning activities are ongoing.
Blue Canyon’s work was performed in Lafayette, Colorado.
About Blue Canyon Technologies About Blue Canyon Technologies
Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT), a subsidiary of RTX, 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.
For the latest news on Blue Canyon Technologies and for other company information, please visit www.bluecanyontech.com.
About RTX
RTX is the world’s largest aerospace and defense company. Our global team of 180,000 employees pushes the limits of known science and redefines how we connect and protect our world. We are advancing aviation, building smarter defense systems and creating innovations to take us deeper into space. The company, with 2022 sales of $67 billion, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.