U.S. Launches Construction of Dedicated D2D Satellite Production Facility

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 14, Elveo Mobile and U.S. satellite platform manufacturer Apex announced a manufacturing partnership to establish Elveo's first dedicated satellite production facility in the United States for the platform manufacturing of its global direct-to-device (D2D) satellite constellation. Elveo will adopt Apex's Factory X satellite manufacturing model to build its production system and acquire technical capabilities related to satellite platform manufacturing and scaled production.

This partnership corresponds to the upstream manufacturing segment of the Elveo constellation, rather than a satellite communications service contract. Apex's Factory X uses its existing Factory One manufacturing system as the physical production template, paired with a digital manufacturing operating system to help partners establish local satellite assembly and production lines. According to Apex, the standard construction timeline for Factory X can reach the satellite production stage in as little as approximately 12 months.

Factory X can be scaled from approximately 25,000 square feet to more than 250,000 square feet depending on project requirements. Apex's general capacity model shows that a facility of approximately 100,000 square feet can achieve a production capacity of up to approximately 200 satellites per year under multi-product production conditions; after building larger-scale dedicated lines for a single platform, theoretical capacity can be further expanded to several thousand satellite platforms per year. The above figures represent the capabilities of the Factory X platform; the final size and designed annual output of Elveo's facility have not yet been announced.

Apex's existing platforms include Aries, Nova, and Comet, among others. Aries covers low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, and geostationary orbit configurations, with its LEO variant supporting payloads of up to approximately 150 kilograms; Factory X can configure corresponding satellite assembly lines according to a partner's constellation platform and production volume requirements. This Elveo partnership will leverage this model to establish dedicated production capacity for its D2D satellites.

Elveo Mobile was formed through the integration of satellite communications companies Lynk Global and Omnispace-related businesses, and is currently advancing an S-band non-geostationary orbit D2D satellite network. In August, Nelco, a subsidiary of the Tata Group, invested $20 million in Elveo to advance D2D and IoT satellite connectivity services in South Asia; this partnership with Apex further extends into the satellite platform manufacturing and dedicated capacity construction segment.