K2 Space

A Mega bus weighs about two tonnes and makes roughly twenty kilowatts from twin arrays spanning forty metres deployed, with a three-metre-square deck and about a tonne of payload capacity. The target price is around $15 million, against traditional large satellites costing in the region of $200 million. Getting there needs an unusually large electric thruster, and K2 flies a 20 kilowatt Hall-effect unit, more than four times the power of anything previously operated in orbit.

The Kunjur brothers founded the company on a contrarian reading of the smallsat era. Everyone had spent a decade shrinking satellites to fit launch costs, but Falcon 9 had already cut price per kilogram by an order of magnitude and Starship promised another large step, so the industry was optimising against a constraint that was disappearing. If launch mass stops being scarce, on-orbit power becomes the thing worth maximising. K2 builds the largest cheap bus it can and makes it on an automotive-style line in Torrance, around 85 per cent vertically integrated.

The thruster has flown. GRAVITAS went up in March 2026 and used it to climb from low orbit to medium orbit in under ninety days. That is one spacecraft, though. K2 has flown two satellites in its history and carries a $6.8 billion valuation, and nearly everything supporting that number is production scale that has not happened: a factory rated for a hundred satellites a year, a thirty-satellite constellation for SES not yet built, a 100 kilowatt class announced for 2028. The $15 million price is a target rather than a demonstrated cost at volume, and holding it while making 85 per cent of the spacecraft in-house means absorbing the learning curve on almost every subsystem. Apex and Vast now sell high-power buses to substantially the same customers.