SAN FRANCISCO – Revenues for Lithuanian Nanosatellite manufacturer NanoAvionics tripled in the last 12 months as the company signed contracts with startups and industry veterans.
“As the market for nanosatellites and cubesats matures, NanoAvionics is very well placed with its price points and capability,” NanoAvionics US CEO Brent Abbott told SpaceNews.
NanoAvionics, a spin-off from Vilnius University founded in 2014, announced orders in 2020 from British space video startup Sen, a consortium of Dutch and Norwegian government agencies and Thales Alenia Space.
“We’re going to hopefully be announcing a couple more commercial and noncommercial orders rather soon,” Abbott said.
NanoAvionics focuses intently on keeping costs low.
“Granted, you have to be technically proficient, meet the requirements and have flight heritage,” Abbott said. “Then it becomes a price question.”
That is especially true for true for constellation developers seeking to whittle down costs to close their business cases, he added.
In addition to selling cubesats and subsystems, NanoAvionics is expanding its product line “to taking full control of each aspect in the development of its clients’ satellites from systems development to mission integration, logistics and operations,” the company announced Aug. 3.
Because 90% of NanoAvionics clients buy “additional services such as satellite registration, insurance and launch brokerage, becoming a one-stop-shop is a logical next step,” said NanoAvionics CEO Vytenis Buzas.
Recently, NanoAvionics expanded its U.S. presence to include a satellite manufacturing facility in Illinois.
“We are bucking the trend to go to the coasts or Denver,” Abbott said. “We’ve built a clean room and manufacturing facility [in Illinois] so we can address customer needs for lower costs and be centrally located.”
NanoAvionics’ Midland, Texas, facility “functions as a scalable resource that allows the company to mass produce their nanosatellite buses for constellation orders,” according to the news release.