With this new line of products, Vast enters an increasingly crowded market. Historically, in the United States, a handful of large companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Maxar and Sierra Space have manufactured medium and large satellites. These were usually expensive and often custom-made designs costing tens or often hundreds of millions of dollars.
But some trends have changed the landscape in recent years. The US government’s Space Development Agency has signaled that it prefers proliferated constellations: many dispersed satellites present a less concentrated target than a few larger, more expensive satellites. With the increased cadence of the Falcon 9 rocket, as well as ride-sharing missions, it became easier and sometimes cheaper to launch smaller and medium-sized satellites into orbit.
This has led to an influx of venture capital to back a new generation of companies seeking to build less expensive, more modular satellites that can serve a variety of purposes. There are several prominent and relatively new players in this area, including K2 Space, Rocket Lab, True Anomaly, Blue Canyon, and Millennium Space Systems.
Vast already has… vast facilities
Haot said most of these companies are still emerging, with products that are not yet mature. In other words, he believes that if Vast Space can work, it could become a market leader, especially with power-hungry applications. Vast has already invested $1 billion in spacecraft manufacturing facilities, including clean rooms, which can be used for both space stations and satellites, he said.
The number of satellites in space has skyrocketed in recent years, largely due to the rapid expansion of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. For decades, the total number of satellites orbiting Earth was about 4,000, but in the last five years that number has increased to about 14,000.
This is just the beginning. By some estimates, in another decade there will be approximately 500,000 satellites in orbit for communications, Earth observation, orbital data centers and other applications.
Haot expects about 90 percent of them to be satellites built by SpaceX, Amazon, Blue Origin or other major players. But even 10 percent of that figure, if available to commercial satellite bus manufacturers, would represent 50,000 satellites for which Vast and other companies could compete.
