The aerospace industry is expanding at a rapid pace. With high-profile contracts being awarded and private companies entering the fold, the new space economy is ushering in increasingly innovative and creative means of engineering and production.
Blue Canyon Technologies stands at the crossroads between state-of-the- art technology development and efficient, cost-effective production, allowing the company to effectively lower the barrier of entry to space without sacrificing quality.
Since Blue Canyon’s founding in 2008, and through its acquisition by Raytheon Technologies and integration into Raytheon Intelligence & Space, the company has established a reputation for delivering success through vertical integration. Blue Canyon develops the majority of its spacecraft components in-house, eliminating the need for outsourcing and ultimately reducing the final cost for the customer.
A benefit of this structure is that Blue Canyon has truly been able to hone in on its internal production and put its components through rigorous testing to ensure the final product is something worth launching into space.
Blue Canyon’s Attitude Control System products enable smallsats to point with unparalleled accuracy. Precision is a core principle in Blue Canyon’s production philosophy, and the XACT line of integrated attitude control solutions is evidence of that accomplishment.
Technical innovation often involves miniaturization — satellites are no exception to that rule. With satellites becoming ever smaller, Blue Canyon has remained nimble in ensuring its systems can be applied to a variety of applications — no matter how small.
Enter the FleXcore : an attitude control system offering all of the advantages of cubesats within a small bus. With XACT-based features and software, FleXcore provides customers with access to high performance and cost-effective solutions that are scalable to a wide variety of missions and bus sizes.
Blue Canyon’s line of reaction wheels provide a combination of torque and momentum storage that is crucial for spacecraft to enable them to navigate missions successfully and with precision. Any size reaction wheel can be used with Blue Canyon Attitude Control Systems, resulting in a high degree of modularity and allowing customers to mix and match to cater to mission requirements. Additionally, Blue Canyon components are built to last and endure the entire duration of mission operations.
Blue Canyon has diligently placed as much attention, resources and investment into scaling up production as it has to crafting the latest component innovations. The commercial aerospace industry is slowly, but surely, approaching ubiquity with the recently increased prominence and relative affordability of services.
Blue Canyon has ramped up production to ensure that the company could accommodate the rapidly expanding consumer base of the aerospace industry and to do so at price points that enable companies to access space in ways they otherwise wouldn’t be able to — Blue Canyon’s goal is to allow access to space at a greater rate than ever before possible.
Ultimately, thanks to vertical integration, Blue Canyon Technologies can significantly drive down component production costs and that leads to a more affordable price tag for the customer. Reduced costs lower the barrier of entry to space – and they actively encourage more potential customers to buy-in and enter the aerospace sector.
No missions can be considered “risk-free,” but with a reduced-price tag comes a higher potential return on investment. This more accessible cost structure results in Blue Canyon being far more risk-tolerant than the firm’s competitors.
BCT Attitude Control Actuators and Sensors Matt Ellis,
Components Program Manager
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Test Lead
What’s more, when costs are reduced, Blue Canyon is able to produce far more products than it would otherwise have been able to provide if the company relied on importing and purchasing components from outside companies and third parties.
Blue Canyon Technologies represents the best elements of the new space economy. M o r g a n S t a n l e y estimates that the roughly $350 billion global space industry could surge to more than $1 trillion by 2040. The advent of ridesharing, miniaturization of satellites and a plethora of other relatively recent developments represent the precipice of this massive, industry-wide expansion.
Through the company’s innovative line of components that feature industry-leading precision to an incredibly efficient production system rooted in the company’s vertically integrated structure, Blue Canyon is capitalizing on the burgeoning aerospace industry by perpetually pursuing technological innovation and ensuring that the new space economy will be more accessible than ever before.
In his role as Executive Director of Components, author Matthew Pallas is responsible for P&L execution of Blue Canyon’s spacecraft component product lines. Over the past five years, Matt has delivered numerous systems for flight, including leading Blue Canyon’s flagship product line, XACT, and served as PM/SE on four spacecraft programs from contract award through delivery.
Prior to joining Blue Canyon, Matt worked for more than a decade at DigitalGlobe, supporting the WorldView programs. Matt holds a degree in Physics and Astrophysics from the University of Colorado at Boulder.