en.Wedoany.com Reported - Canada's MDA Space Ltd. officially inaugurated its new-generation high-volume satellite manufacturing facility in Montreal, Quebec, on May 8, 2026, local time, marking the company's strategic transformation from a traditional space manufacturer to a satellite prime contractor entering the substantive operational phase.
This new facility, with an expansion area of 185,000 square feet, was completed in less than two years, from groundbreaking to the operational readiness of its clean rooms, doubling MDA Space's total manufacturing footprint. MDA Space had previously disclosed to investors that the factory, at full capacity, can produce 400 satellites per year. Vice President of Operations Sylvain Riendeau publicly detailed the specific measure of this capacity in an official blog post: "People are awed by the sheer scale of the building, but most importantly, every aspect of operations has been meticulously designed to enable us to achieve the goal of delivering up to two satellites per day."
The core product of the new factory is the MDA AURORA™ digital satellite product line, a software-defined satellite platform supporting dynamic beamforming, which can be flexibly configured with different payloads such as communications and remote sensing based on customer requirements. Inside the factory, a continuous serial production line has been designed for the AURORA series, where the assembly, integration, and testing of electronic components flow sequentially along specially designed lines. Highly automated inspection equipment has reduced the assembly and inspection time for printed circuit boards to one-quarter of the original, with peak capacity reaching hundreds of finished boards per day. Augmented reality systems are about to be deployed at active antenna assembly stations, projecting operating instructions onto work surfaces to guide technicians; linear robots are simultaneously being introduced to handle repetitive tasks, achieving human-machine collaboration. Multiple near-field test chambers developed in-house by MDA Space are deployed, allowing antenna testing for different AURORA satellite models to be conducted in parallel, significantly compressing delivery cycles.
Demand on the delivery side comes from several secured commercial constellation contracts. The factory's initial mass production tasks include 198 satellites for the Telesat Lightspeed broadband constellation and an order for Globalstar's next-generation low Earth orbit constellation. MDA Space CEO Mike Greenley confirmed during the Q1 2026 earnings call that the first batch of replacement constellation satellites for Globalstar had been delivered and passed customer acceptance, the critical design review for the next-generation constellation was completed, and space-grade chips required for the Lightspeed project are arriving steadily through the subsidiary SatixFy. In the first quarter of 2026, the company's Satellite Systems business segment revenue was CAD 313.1 million, a year-over-year increase of 41%, accounting for over 67% of the company's total quarterly revenue, directly benefiting from the increased workload from these two major constellation projects.
Beyond commercial satellite orders, the factory is also undertaking high-volume manufacturing tasks for other space components. In April 2026, Airbus selected MDA Space to design and manufacture over 880 Ka-band steerable antennas and 440 Ku-band user replacement antennas for the expansion plan of the OneWeb low Earth orbit constellation, owned by France's Eutelsat, with all production and testing to be completed at the new Montreal facility. This contract is a renewal following the approximately 2,000 antenna order MDA Space received from OneWeb in 2016, bringing the cumulative antenna deliveries to over 3,300 units. MDA Space has accumulated antenna system delivery experience across over 350 satellite missions, and OneWeb presented it with a performance award after the initial deployment phase.
MDA Space's revenue growth curve provides direct support for absorbing the new factory's capacity. For the full year 2025, the company reported revenue of CAD 1.63 billion and a net profit of CAD 108.5 million; as of the end of Q1 2026, its backlog of orders stood at CAD 3.7 billion, providing revenue certainty for 2026 and subsequent years. The company reiterated its full-year 2026 revenue guidance of CAD 1.7 billion to CAD 1.9 billion.
MDA Space Vice President of Operations Sylvain Riendeau and Vice President of Satellite Systems Luigi Pozzebon jointly noted in the official announcement that new engineering and manufacturing processes, along with performance data collection mechanisms, have been fully established in the new factory to maximize efficiency and agility. In the factory inauguration statement, CEO Greenley positioned the facility as "a defining milestone in the history of MDA Space," stating that this expansion equips the company with the capability to deliver large satellite constellations with speed and scale advantages.
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