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 is not a claim. GRAVITAS flew in March 2026 and used it to raise itself from low orbit to medium orbit in under ninety days, which is a real and independently notable result. It is also one spacecraft. 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.