Apex manufactures Aries buses at scale and offers configurable performance packages for diverse mission needs.
Factory One will serve as Apex’s headquarters and production facility with a capacity to produce dozens of spacecraft per year.
Apex is producing five additional Aries units for customers in 2024 and plans to ramp production to 20 spacecraft by 2025.
Apex specializes in building productized satellite buses starting with the Aries platform.
Apex established a new headquarters and production facility called Factory One in the Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Apex plans for Factory One to produce 50 satellite platforms annually across its Aries and Nova-class models within a few years.
Apex signed a 10-year lease for Factory One with the intention for it to serve as the company’s headquarters.
Apex signed a lease on 2023-12-14 for a nearly 4,300-square-meter building in the Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles to serve as a production facility called Factory One.
Apex’s first satellite, Call to Adventure, carrying payloads for multiple customers, is scheduled to launch on the SpaceX Transporter-10 rideshare mission in early 2024.
Development of Factory One is supported by a $16,000,000 Series A round Apex raised in June.
The satellites produced at Factory One will include a mix of Apex’s initial Aries satellite bus and its larger Nova bus based on customer demand.
APEX 1.0 is being used for a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission led by Draper.
The Series 3 development will leverage work done on APEX 1.0, a lander formerly known as Series 2 that is being developed by ispace U.S.
The first APEX 1.0 lander for the Draper CLPS mission is designated Mission 3 by ispace and is slated to launch in 2026.
The Series 3 lander will be designed and manufactured in Japan as the successor to the Series 1 lander and the APEX 1.0 lander (formerly Series 2).
Draper is leading a team that includes ispace US, which is designing a new lunar lander called APEX 1.0.
The APEX 1.0 design aims to resolve vibration issues found in the previous Series 2 design.
APEX 1.0 will be able to host up to 300 kg of payloads with the ability to expand to 500 kg.
ispace technologies U.S. unveiled a revised lunar lander design called APEX 1.0 at an event on 2023-09-28 in Centennial, Colorado.
APEX 1.0 includes dedicated satellite bays intended to support relay satellites for direct-to-Earth communications in cislunar space and from the Moon’s far side.