Blue Canyon Tech

September 02, 2020 08:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Rapidly growing spacecraft manufacturer and space mission services provider Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) announced that its 6U spacecraft built for a DARPA-sponsored project managed by Aurora Flight Sciences with a payload developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was successfully deployed by NanoRacks from the International Space Station in mid-July. The Deformable Mirror Demonstration Mission (DeMi) is a technology demonstration using a Boston Micromachines microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) deformable mirror (DM).

The objective of DeMi is to demonstrate using MEMS deformable mirror technology for adaptive optics in space. The MEMS DMs can be used for a range of in-space applications, including optical communication and wide-field scanning telescopes.

Aurora Flight Sciences awarded the contract to BCT to build and test the new 6U-class CubeSat bus used for the DeMi mission. BCT’s 6U spacecraft is a high-performance CubeSat that includes an ultra-precise attitude control system that allows for accurate knowledge and fine-pointing of the satellite payload. The highly integrated design also maximizes payload volume.

While other single micro-mirror optical MEMS components have been used in the past, MEMS DMs have a higher actuator density and lower size and weight compared to other designs, which makes them more resilient, allows for easier accommodation in spacecraft, and can result in better image quality.

“Aurora Flight Sciences and MIT are utilizing new-space to bring new technologies to the larger space community and Blue Canyon is proud to have provided the bus for the DeMi mission,” said Steve Stem, Spacecraft Systems Engineer for Blue Canyon Technologies.

“Working with BCT to provide the DeMi spacecraft bus allowed MIT to focus on the design and implementation of the science payload,” said Rachel Morgan, one of the mission’s lead graduate research assistants. “The DeMi mission is an exciting example of using CubeSats to demonstrate new technologies for future space telescopes, and the Aurora/MIT team is very excited to start getting science results from the payload in space,” said Dr. Ewan Douglas, a research affiliate of MIT AeroAstro and Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

Specifically, the DeMi Mission will help determine the functionality of MEMS DMs on-orbit, and to characterize their behavior in microgravity. MEMS DMs are already commonly used in ground-based telescope adaptive optics systems.

The DM devices will need to withstand radiation effects, spacecraft charging, long-term temperature cycling, and extended operation in vacuum, many of which are difficult to replicate in a lab environment. This low-earth orbit (LEO) mission will validate the technology, as well as provide risk reduction for development of flight software, wavefront sensing and control algorithms, electronics hardware, and mechanical packaging needed to operate a MEMS DM in space.

About BCT

Blue Canyon Technologies, Inc., (BCT) a Colorado-based private company founded in 2008 to bring innovative, reliable and affordable solutions to space missions. As a leading provider of vertically integrated spacecraft, components and space mission services, BCT manufactures a wide-range of satellites supporting a multitude of payload requirements, including its newest X-SAT class of microsatellites, a compact, affordable and resilient bus that includes secure communication. BCT also manufactures a vast-range of high-performance components, including attitude control systems, star trackers, reaction wheels, control moment gyroscopes and power systems. The company currently has more than 90 satellites in production and recently developed a new 80,000-square-foot facility for high rate production.

BCT has supported missions from low-earth orbit to deep space for the most demanding customers in the U.S. Defense & Intelligence community, as well as NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and commercial partners. The manufacturer has been recognized with awards including Inc. Magazine’s 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies, 2017 Colorado Companies to Watch and the 2019 Colorado Biz Made in Colorado Emerging Manufacturer Winner.

For the latest news on Blue Canyon Technologies and for other Company information, please visit www.bluecanyontech.com. You can follow the Company on Instagram here or Twitter here.

The quickly growing Boulder-based small satellite and mission services company continues to rise through the ranks, with a growth rate of more than 670 percent

August 12, 2020 07:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) today announced it has once again topped the Inc. 5000: The Most Successful Companies in America list, an annual ranking of the 5,000 fastest-growing privately held companies in the U.S.

Blue Canyon ranked in the top fifth, coming in at No. 698. The company’s placement on the list is a result of Blue Canyon’s growth rate of more than 670 percent in the last year. This is the fourth year BCT has earned a place in the rankings.

“As a company, we’ve made it a priority to invest in smart, deliberate growth and new hires as we work to deliver consistently innovative solutions for our customers,” said George Stafford, CEO and president of Blue Canyon Technologies. “This prestigious ranking once again demonstrates our leadership in the space industry, and the opportunity we offer to new, innovative talent.”

Blue Canyon’s diverse spacecraft platform has the proven capability to enable a broad range of missions and technological advances for the New Space economy, further reducing the barriers of space entry. BCT is currently building more than 90 spacecraft for government, commercial and academic missions. This year, the company opened its new 80,000 square-foot manufacturing facility, the Crescent Satellite Constellation Factory near Boulder, bringing their manufacturing footprint to nearly 140,000 square feet across locations in Colorado and New Mexico.

The company recently announced the details of its contract award for Phases 2 and 3 of the Blackjack Program, a military space capabilities demonstration developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The contract has an initial award value of $14.2 million with a total potential value of $99.4 million if all options are exercised.

This, and other recent contract wins from the past year, will allow Blue Canyon Technologies to hire more employees, creating new jobs in an uncertain market and adding a vast amount of expertise and talent to its various teams. The company currently has 260 employees.

About BCT

Blue Canyon Technologies, Inc., (BCT) a Colorado-based private company founded in 2008 to bring innovative, reliable and affordable solutions to space missions, is an experienced integrator of aerospace systems and developer of advanced aerospace products and technologies. BCT is a vertically integrated spacecraft manufacturer supporting nearly 50 unique missions with over 90 spacecraft. The company currently has more than 90 satellites in production and recently developed a new 80,000-square-foot facility for high rate production.

BCT has supported missions for the U.S. Air Force, NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and many others and provided the Attitude Control Systems for the first interplanetary CubeSats which successfully traveled to Mars. The company has been recognized with awards including Inc. Magazine’s 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies, 2017 Colorado Companies to Watch, 2019 Best in Biz and the 2019 Colorado Biz Made in Colorado Emerging Manufacturer Winner.

For the latest news on Blue Canyon Technologies and for other company information, please visit www.bluecanyontech.com. You can follow the company on Instagram here or Twitter here.

Unique mission will provide secure communications across the globe using Loft Orbital’s YAM-4 spacecraft being developed by Blue Canyon Technologies

August 05, 2020 08:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Small satellite manufacturer and mission services provider Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) has been selected by Loft Orbital to develop and build the YAM-4 spacecraft bus for the Quantum Encryption and Science Satellite (QEYSSat) mission.

The QEYSSat mission is being led by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Honeywell. The CSA awarded Honeywell a $30 million dollar contract for the design and implementation phases of the mission. The mission will demonstrate the use of advanced encryption technology, also known as quantum key distribution (QKD), in space for secure online communications on Earth. According to CSA, this QKD technology will create encryption codes that are virtually unbreakable, allowing for more secure communications in the age of quantum computing.

“Having a secure communication infrastructure is critical in this day and age,” says George Stafford, President and CEO of Blue Canyon Technologies. “Our foundational support of the YAM-4 spacecraft will make the access to space for this type of demonstration less expensive and quicker to launch, allowing Canadian scientists to study how QKD behaves in space.”

The satellite will be designed using BCT’s newest X-SAT line of spacecraft, specifically the X-SAT Venus-Class which can carry payloads up to 90 kg. As with other BCT X-SAT buses, the X-SAT Venus-Class is a high-agility platform, enabling the onboard instrument to collect data and revisit sites frequently. The X-SAT Venus-Class’s compact profile is designed to maximize the volume, mass and power available for the CSA mission.

“BCT is a best-in-class bus provider and we are confident in their ability to deliver a spacecraft that meets the unique performance requirements of this mission,” said John Eterno, VP Missions at Loft Orbital.

The benefits of QEYSSat will be substantial. Because encryption keys cannot be compromised, they are virtually impossible to crack, and integration this technology into Canadian communications networks would guarantee the privacy of public, private and commercial data. While ground-based QKD devices are available for use today, their capabilities are limited: current systems rely on cables to transmit quantum particles on land, but the signals can become unreliable over long distances. To provide the capacity across long distances, even globally, the network must be able to use satellites in lieu of cables.

Blue Canyon’s diverse spacecraft platform has the proven capability to enable a broad range of missions and technological advances for the New Space economy, further reducing the barriers of space entry.
BCT is currently building more than 60 spacecraft for government, commercial and academic missions. The company has doubled in size over the past 12 months and recently opened its new 80,000-square-foot headquarters and satellite constellation production facility in Jun

About BCT

Blue Canyon Technologies, Inc., (BCT) a Colorado-based private company founded in 2008 to bring innovative, reliable and affordable solutions to space missions, is an experienced integrator of aerospace systems and developer of advanced aerospace products and technologies. BCT is a vertically integrated spacecraft manufacturer supporting nearly 40 unique missions with over 70 spacecraft. The company currently has more than 60 satellites in production and is developing a new 80,000-square-foot facility for high rate production.

BCT has supported missions for the U.S. Air Force, NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and many others and provided the Attitude Control Systems for the first interplanetary CubeSats which successfully traveled to Mars. The company has been recognized with awards including Inc Magazine’s 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies, 2017 Colorado Companies to Watch, and the 2019 Colorado Biz Made in Colorado Emerging Manufacturer Winner.

For the latest news on Blue Canyon Technologies and for other company information, please visit www.bluecanyontech.com. You can follow the company on Instagram here or Twitter here.

by Sandra Erwin for Space News — July 3, 2020

If DARPA exercises all options, the contract has a potential value of $99.4 million.

WASHINGTON — Blue Canyon Technologies is producing four satellite buses for the Blackjack program under a $14.1 million contract awarded last month by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The contract has options for DARPA to buy up to 20 satellites for $99.4 million.

The contract puts Blue Canyon in a position to become the leading supplier of satellites buses for DARPA’s Blackjack program — an elaborate project to demonstrate the military utility of a mesh network of small satellites in low Earth orbit. DARPA said its goal is to deploy 20 satellites by 2022.

Although DARPA signed study contracts with other bus providers, only Blue Canyon has a production contract.

“Multiple bus providers remain under consideration,” Blackjack program manager Rusty Thomas told SpaceNews July 2.

He said DARPA had to put Blue Canyon on contract now in order to meet program deadlines. A key concern is making sure the satellite can operate Blackjack’s command-and-control software known as Pit Boss.

The contract lets the company start “detailed system design to ensure Pit Boss autonomy interfaces are compatible with Blue Canyon’s existing flight computer,” Thomas said. “Awarding now enables long lead procurement of bus components to support 2021 assembly, integration, test and launch schedules.”

DARPA wants Blackjack satellites to be modular so new payloads can be added without having to redesign the bus. The idea is to speed up the production and lower the cost of satellites compared to traditional acquisitions of custom-built spacecraft.

William Schum, program manager at Blue Canyon in Boulder, Colorado, told SpaceNews that the company will make Blackjack satellites at a new manufacturing facility in Lafayette, Colorado.

If DARPA exercises all options to buy 20 satellites, Schum said, that would make Blackjack the biggest contract ever won by Blue Canyon.

The satellites are based on the 150-kilogram X-SAT microsatellite bus that Blue Canyon manufacturers for commercial use. “There’s a little bit of customization,” said Schum. “In Blackjack, the driving force is to keep the cost down, take a commercial bus and see what it can do with military payloads.”

“It’s a complicated mission,” Schum said of Blackjack. Multiple suppliers are developing DoD payloads and the Pit Boss on-board system is a “critical component.”

SEAKR Engineering is developing Pit Boss. Lockheed Martin is responsible for integrating the satellites

Thomas said SEAKR serves as the “constellation and mission-level integrator above the satellite level, with support from Lockheed Martin systems engineers who are tasked with ensuring gaps between these levels are addressed by SEAKR or Lockheed Martin.”

by Caleb Henry at SpaceNews — June 19, 2020

WASHINGTON — Smallsat builder Blue Canyon Technologies is moving employees into a recently opened factory designed to build 100 satellites a year, and more in the future. 

The Crescent Satellite Constellation manufacturing facility in Lafayette, Colorado, near the city of Boulder, opened June 3, Matt Beckner, Blue Canyon chief operating officer, told SpaceNews. 

Because the factory opened during the coronavirus pandemic, employees are working staggered shifts and social distancing. Beckner said about 65-75 people are working at the same time, though the factory can support 275 workers at full operations. 

Beckner said the Crescent factory has two production lines each capable of completing one satellite a week, marking a shift from the company’s older site in Boulder.

“With this move, we transition from building a single satellite at a time in a clean room to building 10 or 20 at a time in a production line, also in a clean room, with a one satellite cadence per production line per week,” he said. 

Beckner declined to say how much Blue Canyon spent building the 80,000-square-foot facility. He said the company will continue installing equipment and adding people over the next few months, with the facility supporting its first spacecraft builds around September. 

Blue Canyon expects the factory to produce 50 satellites in 2021, Beckner said, and more in the years to follow. The factory can build satellites from cubesats up to 350-kilogram microsatellites, and will serve a mix of commercial, military and civil space customers, he said. 

Beckner said Blue Canyon seeks to differentiate itself by emphasizing vertical integration. 

“We produce greater than 90% of all of the components that go into our satellites,” he said. “That helps us keep our costs down, our technical performance at its best, and for us to evolve and pivot as the marketplace changes.”

Blue Canyon Technologies can build around 150 satellites a year using its original Boulder plant and its new Crescent factory, Beckner said. The company plans to install additional equipment at its Crescent factory to double its output, he said. 

by Sandra Erwin for Space News — April 24, 2020

Lockheed Martin will integrate satellite buses and payloads with data processors.

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $5.8 million contract for satellite integration work for the Blackjack program, the company announced April 24.

Blackjack is a project to deploy a constellation of 20 satellites in low Earth orbit by 2022 and demonstrate that a LEO system can provide global high-speed communications.

Lockheed Martin will define and manage interfaces between Blackjack’s satellite buses, payloads and the so-called Pit Boss autonomous data processor. The work will be performed at the company’s satellite manufacturing plant in Sunnyvale, California.

“This is an exciting new approach to plug-and-play design for LEO,” said Sarah Reeves, vice president of missile defense programs at Lockheed Martin.

With Blackjack, DARPA seeks to demonstrate key technologies needed for a global high-speed network in LEO that the Defense Department can use for broadband communication and can adapt for other purposes like missile defense or navigation.

During the satellite integration phase of the program, multiple types of payloads provided by different vendors will be evaluated for use in communications, missile defense, PNT (positioning, navigation, timing) and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance).

For the Blackjack program, DARPA has selected buses from Airbus, Blue Canyon Technologies and Telesat. Payload suppliers include Collins Aerospace, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Trident, SA Photonics, Airbus, Systems & Technology Research, Sky Quantum and L3Harris. Scientific Systems Company, SEAKR Engineering and BAE Systems are developing Pit Boss concepts.

DARPA wants to make plug-and-play satellites where new payloads can be added without having to redesign the bus. That approach would allow the military to speed up the production and lower the cost of satellites compared to traditional acquisitions of custom-built spacecraft.

The plan is to launch the first two satellites in 2021 and 18 more in 2022.

Dear BCT Customers and Partners,

As the impact of COVID-19 continues to be felt worldwide, we wanted to reach out to inform you of what Blue Canyon Technologies has been doing to help protect our employees and customers during these challenging times. We have been closely monitoring updates from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as following the guidelines and mandates provided by the US Federal and local governments. The health and well-being of our customers, employees, partners and community is of utmost importance to us.

To date, Blue Canyon Technologies has no reported cases of positive COVID-19 diagnoses. In order to maintain this condition and prevent exposure, we are following the guidelines, mandates and recommendations made by authorities. As a critical supplier to the United States Defense Industrial Base, we are developing innovative methods to continue our essential business operations and keep projects on track and moving forward.

 As such, we are executing the following steps:

• Enabling telework capabilities for any employee able to perform their job function remotely
• For those employees who need to be in the office, we have increased our efforts to keep our offices safe, clean and compliant with CDC sanitation recommendations
• Implementation of enhanced remote conferencing capabilities
• Augmented network access and enhanced cyber security measures
• Providing our employees with information and best practices to minimize the spread of any illness
• Limitations on outside visitors to our facilities
• Restrictions on all business travel until further notice

We’re committed to working with you in a safe and productive manner and will provide updates as the situation evolves. Our leadership team is meeting on a daily basis to ensure we are taking the appropriate measures to support our team and customers.  Please do not hesitate to reach out to your contacts at Blue Canyon Technologies, or directly to an executive team member, with any questions or concerns. We will continue to monitor the situation and use every effort to deliver uninterrupted services to all our customers and partners.  We value your business, but most importantly we value your health.

Sincerely,

BCT Executive Team

Darrell Etherington with Tech Crunch / 12:27 pm MST • February 12, 2020

In-orbit manufacturing startup Made in Space has tapped Colorado’s Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) to help support its Archinaut One demonstration mission contracted by NASA, which is currently set to take place in 2022. The mission will see Made in Space show off the assembly of two ten-meter solar arrays on orbit, which will then be used to power an ESPA-class satellite, providing up to five times more power than is available via power sources used for those satellites not assembled in orbit.

BCT will be providing development of the spacecraft platform (along with Northrop Grumman)  that Made in Space will use to delver its Archinaut manufacturing platform, which employs additive manufacturing and robotic assembly to be able to build structures while in orbit. The Colorado company, founded in 2008, has developed a number of spacecraft for a variety of projects including JPL’s first-ever operational CubeSat project, the Asteria space telescope.

I spoke to BCT Systems Engineer Brian Crum about the Made in Space project, and he said that it’s representative of the kind of work they’ve been doing, which mainly concentrates around interesting demonstration missions and initial operations of novel space technologies that could have tremendous impact on how work is done in space.

“Given the size of spacecraft that we develop and specialize in, and at that price point, it really lends itself to these Demonstration Missions that are follow-on to operational concepts,” he said. “We are a good solution for testing out concepts, and we get approached quite a bit for that […] we get a lot of interesting ideas of people wanting to try things, and this is definitely one of them.”

BCT is actually in the process of building more than 60 spacecraft, and it doubled in size over the past year. Next, the company plans to open a new combined headquarters and production facility that spans over 80,000 sq ft, which should be opening sometime later this year. That growth is directly driven by an uptick in business – something Crum says is the result of a boom in experimentation and technology demonstrations coming from all vectors, including government and private industry.

“There are definitely more people that have more appetite for risk,” he said. “We we are growing because the demand for the spacecraft is growing, that’s the simple answer. We’re we’re hiring the right people to support these programs, and the the number of programs is greatly increasing. Along with that, as we grow larger in size, and the spacecraft grow larger and size, they become more complex which means they need a little bit more effort. So there’s there’s a little bit more engineering that goes into them as well.”

Elizabeth Howell contributor with Forbes Feb 12, 2020

In the quest to build bigger things in space, one Colorado-based company is readying for an epic construction demonstration mission.

Blue Canyon Technologies will provide the spacecraft vehicle infrastructure supporting a “factory” that will 3D-print solar arrays in space. The mission is called Archinaut One and its lead developer is Made In Space (which has a working 3D-printer on the ISS.) The mission is funded by a a $73.7 million contract from NASA. The amount given to Blue Canyon, a 100% employee-owned company, has not disclosed.

“This could be a game changer for the entire space industry” if the mission works, said Lorie Booth, the systems engineering program manager at Blue Canyon, in an interview. Archinaut is slated to launch no earlier than 2022 and aims to assemble two 32-foot solar arrays in space. And that could save a lot of cost and complication for future missions.

One thing that would become easier is launching things to space. If a payload is too delicate or too big to go on a rocket, no problem — robots could instead make the thing once the spacecraft reaches orbit. In the further future, robot assembly could reduce the time astronauts spend “outside” their spacecraft spacewalking, since robots would be making things instead of them.

In fact, this is already starting to happen on the International Space Station, where the robotic Canadarm2 moves heavy items from place to place under the control of Earthlings. The next obvious leap in technology would be automation, and there is a Canadarm3 slated to join NASA’s moon-orbiting Gateway space station in the 2020s in support of lunar landing missions starting as early as 2024. Canadarm3 would be equipped with some artificial intelligence to maintain Gateway while astronauts aren’t there.

For Blue Canyon, Archinaut One will be a proving mission for its new Saturn-class spacecraft bus, which is larger than what they’ve sent up in the past. (A spacecraft bus is, essentially, the mass produced base model of a spacecraft, which is then customized for particular missions.) At about the size of a small filing cabinet, the company is hoping this bus will be better able to support scientific data gathering for its customers. Bigger buses mean more space to store things, like cameras and instruments.

The 12-year-old company has supported missions for many reference customers, including NASA, the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). As a privately owned firm, it does not disclose revenue details, but Booth said both revenues and employee numbers are growing rapidly. (The company has 215 employees today, after hiring more than 100 in the past year.)

Blue Canyon also provided the attitude control systems for the first interplanetary CubeSats — MarCO — which successfully flew to Mars in 2019 to support the landing of the NASA InSight mission. When asked if the company could see itself helping to build structures near the moon and Mars, Booth was enthusiastic: “I don’t see why not,” she said.

by Debra Werner with Space News — February 12, 2020

SAN FRANCISCO –Blue Canyon Technologies (BCT) announced plans Feb. 12 to supply its X-SAT small satellite for Made In Space’s Archinaut One on-orbit manufacturing demonstration mission.

“The implications of our ability to conduct 3D printing in space are endless and we’re proud to partner with Made In Space to make this mission a reality,” George Stafford, BCT founder and CEO, said in a statement. “More and more we’re finding that our spacecraft bus capabilities are enabling increasingly innovative technologies, changing the new space frontier and how we can leverage it.”

For the Archinaut One mission, BCT will assemble and functionally test X-SAT, its largest satellite bus, prior to delivering it to Made In Space. Made In Space will perform payload integration and space vehicle testing, Brian Crum, BCT spacecraft systems engineer, said by email. BCT declined to comment on the value of its contract with Made In Space.

BCT also is supplying X-SAT to MethaneSAT, a subsidiary of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, for an environmental monitoring satellite scheduled to launch in 2022. BCT advertises X-SAT on its website as a 250-kilogram class satellite with a deployable solar array that provides 400 watts of peak power.

NASA awarded Made In Space a $73.7 million contract to additively manufacture a pair of ten-meter beams onboard the Archinaut One satellite scheduled to launch no earlier than 2022. In orbit, Archinaut One’s onboard robotic arm will integrate the solar arrays with its power system. If all goes as planned, the Archinaut One arrays will produce five times the power of similar ESPA-class satellites, according to the news release.

BCT has expanded rapidly in recent years to keep up with growing demand for satellite components, satellite buses and mission operations from its Boulder, Colorado, headquarters. BCT is building more than 60 spacecraft for government, commercial and academic missions. The company, which has doubled in size over the past 12 months, plans to open an 80,000-square-foot headquarters and production facility in 2020.