Apex

Apex sells satellite buses out of a catalogue. Aries is the small one at about 125 kilograms, carrying up to 150 kilograms of payload for somewhere between $3.5 and $5.7 million. Nova is the middle platform at roughly 600 kilograms with a kilowatt of power. Comet is the large one, taking up to three tonnes of payload and flat-packing so that six stack inside a five-metre fairing. Apex publishes its prices, which almost nobody in this industry does.

Ian Cinnamon came at the problem from Palantir rather than from aerospace and concluded that the bus was the schedule bottleneck in national security space, because every programme re-engineered the same spacecraft from scratch. Apex holds the bus fixed and asks the customer to adapt the payload, inverting how prime contractors work, and builds them on a Los Angeles line in weeks rather than years. Max Benassi, who spent six years on Falcon 9 and Starlink propulsion at SpaceX, runs the hardware side.

The catalogue is further along on paper than in orbit. Aries SN1 has been flying since March 2024 with Anduril and Booz Allen payloads aboard and three more have been delivered, but Nova, the GEO version of Aries and Comet are all either pre-flight or unconfirmed, and Comet, the platform the large-constellation story depends on, is not due to fly until 2028. Factory One is being scaled toward two hundred buses a year against a disclosed backlog of about $100 million, so utilisation rests on defence awards landing on schedule. Apex was not among the twelve companies picked for space-based interceptor prototypes in April 2026, and answered by self-funding a demonstration called Project Shadow, announced for no earlier than June 2026 and not publicly confirmed to have flown.