Closing Bell - Manifest Space: A Year in Orbit with Apex Space CEO Ian Cinnamon 3/27/25

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Apex Space, a satellite manufacturing startup is celebrating on year of its satellite on orbit this month. Founded in 2022, the startup’s goal is to ease the production process of off-the-shelf satellite buses that help customers shift risk and money from making spacecraft to focusing on the missions they want to conduct. A member of Anduril Technologies’ “Super Friends” establishing a new American industrial base, the company secured as $46 million U.S. Space Force contract last month. CEO Ian Cinnamon joins Morgan Brennan to celebrate the milestone, challenges within the spacecraft supply chain, and how Trump 2.0 will tackle space policy.

Apex space just marked a milestone. Its first satellite has now spent a year in orbit, and it's still working. Something where it's very, very difficult for satellites to actually not just get up into orbit and work initially, but to work long term in space. And frankly, what's happened, I think, over the last five or 10 years, as the world has shifted away from saying, let's launch one very big satellite to a lot of smaller satellites. We're in a situation where a lot of those satellite vendors are, one, very slow at producing their satellites, but two, it's very difficult to get a quality working product into orbit. And passing that one-year milestone is one of the biggest indicators of kind of

future success to book that satellite and the same ones that are coming off that same production line. CEO Ian Cinnamon co-founded Apex in 2022 with a purpose of manufacturing off-the-shelf satellite buses that help customers shift risk and money from making bespoke spacecraft to focusing on the missions they actually want to conduct. The company is moving fast. It's partnering with other startups as well as industry stalwarts, referenced on this podcast by Anderle executives as part of that company's team of quote super friends, establishing a new American industrial base. Last month, Apex added a $46 million US Space Force contract to its books as well. Fundamentally, the way we see ourselves is we're a defense company that happens to be operating in the space domain. And most of the customers that we work with are, you know, great defense crimes like Andral is a

wonderful partner of ours. We work with a variety of commercial companies as well who do some work with the government. And then of course, we do some work directly with the government, like the contract that you're referencing. On this episode, Apex's CEO on the one-year milestone, a flexible approach to manufacturing and what just five grand will buy you at the company. I'm Morgan Brennan and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now Ian Cinnamon the founder and CEO of Apex Space. Ian it's great to have you back on Manifest Space thanks for taking the time. Morgan it's great to be here. Alright so you're joining me because

you're marking a big milestone for the company, and that is one year of your first product in space, is that right? That's exactly right. Ares, the satellite, has been on orbit over one year now and still working. So why is that a big deal? Space is difficult, right? You are pummeled with radiation.

You're going through all of these different thermal environments. It's something where it's very, very difficult for satellites to actually not just get up into orbit and work initially, but to work long term in space. And frankly, what's happened, I think, over the last five or 10 years, as the world has shifted away from saying, let's launch one very big satellite to a lot of smaller satellites, we're in a situation where a lot of those satellite vendors are, one, very slow at producing their satellites, but two, it's very difficult to get a quality working product into orbit. And passing that one-year milestone is one of the biggest indicators of future success about that satellite and the same ones that are coming off that same production line.

So we're really excited to have this as an offering, not just for our customers, but for the US government and our allies around the world. What is the, I mean, and maybe I'm putting you on the spot here, but what's like the rate of success versus failure when you launch, you know, a new piece of hardware to space for it to be able to make it to a year? It's a great question. I actually don't know how well that data is actually tracked, and part of the reason is it's very difficult to get honest information from folks about whether the satellite is working or not.

People tend to be a little quiet and not really share the successes and failures. We try to be fairly transparent. We've talked about some of the anomalies we've had on orbit. We've been able to downlink photos from our payloads to prove that it's actually working in so on. Okay, so how many satellite buses are on the production line right now and what does that, I guess what is that cadence of more making their way to space look like? So we're at about a half dozen that are in the production line right now. About half of those are fully built and

waiting for customers to pick them up and about half of them are fully built and waiting for customers to pick them up. And about half of them are being built right now, actively in process. That scale, I think it's something that, you think about the scale of cars or phones or something else and you think six is not very many. Again, in the space industry, when we look at the US government only having launched about 200 or so government satellites last year,

six is like a fairly big number for a company that's barely over two years old. So that to us though is just the beginning and we're working to scale up to a much larger number of satellites in the days and months to come. When customers pick up one of these satellites, one of these satellite buses, what does that look like? Are they basically backing a truck up to the factory? And maybe it's a silly question.

It's not actually. We value customer service so we of course deliver it to them but we wait until they're ready for it, right? They have a clean room where they're able to put it in. I will say something I am very proud of is typically the way it works is you kind of have your own shipping container that you build that the satellite fits into. For us, we actually built our own custom ones that are branded in a pretty cool way. So I'll send you a photo after, but it's definitely one of the perks of buying a

satellite bus from us of how it actually gets delivered. That's kind of fascinating because I always think about like Apple, right? With like their tech products and the way they package them, the way they deliver them. It almost sounds like you're taking a similar approach but you know for an industrial customer or a business customer. I mean, Morgan, when you're ready to buy one and Morgan's side is ready to launch, you can find out firsthand. You can do an unboxing video.

How much would it cost for me to buy one of these? It starts at three and a half million, but we do take a $5,000 credit card deposit, so we can do it right now live. This is like wild that this is the conversation we're having. So what does it look like in terms of your customer base? You know you inked a deal with the Space Force a couple of weeks ago. You've partnered up with defense tech names like Andral, for example. What does that roster look like?

So fundamentally, the way we see ourselves is we're a defense company that happens to be operating in the space domain. And most of the customers that we work with are great defense primes like Andral is a wonderful partner of ours. We work with a variety of commercial companies as well who do some work with the government. And then of course, we do some work directly with the government, like the contract that you're referencing. So we've been able to kind of run the gamut across the different customer bases, but fundamentally for us, I think the thing that excites us

is we're able to build these satellite platforms that serve a variety of different use cases and seeing what they can actually enable on orbit frankly is inspiring for me and I think the entire company. How are you able to produce these as quickly as you are and as efficiently as you are when space is hard and we have seen delays and cost overruns and hiccups from other companies along the way over the course of quite frankly years and decades? Frankly it all comes down to the mentality. So if you think about a satellite, it's a really complex set of hardware.

You're sending it on a one-way trip to space and you really want it to work. And the traditional mentality in the industry is to build something that's custom and perfect for your exact mission type. And that makes a lot of sense. But what happened is in the last few years, thanks to companies like SpaceX and others,

the access to space has fundamentally increased, right? You cover this all the time. But the result of that is people want more satellites faster. And I think what they're realizing is if you try to custom design them every time, it takes too long, you don't know how much it'll cost, quality suffers.

So what we've done is we've said, we're gonna design it upfront one time, we're gonna go build it on a hybrid production line, and then we're gonna go offer it to customers. And a lot of that really comes from my business partner, my co-founder, our chief technology officer, Max Benassi, and he spent his career scaling production at SpaceX. So he was the guy that would take a single component and

say, how do we not just build one, but we build one a day or one a week or one a month. And applying that mindset to satellites and bringing in the software angle, too, that enables all of it has really been a major driver of the rate of production. I do want to get your thoughts. It's been a very busy week for space milestones and for news. You had SpaceX attempt its eighth Starship launch.

They lost the Starship vehicle itself, but they did manage to, for the second time in a row, re-catch that super heavy booster. That's getting a lot of attention right now. We've had two different American-made commercial lunar landers attempt landings on the moon, one very successfully and as expected with Firefly Aerospace, the other with Intuitive Machines, which was attempting its second landing. Looks like it landed, but not as expected and a little bit unclear what that means for the future of that mission. But just sort of this moment we're in for the space economy, especially as I think at times like this, you know, folks tend to, the public tends to seize on the pictures of things like

exploding rockets, but there's so much going on above and beyond that. Absolutely. I mean, another one too is there was a first ever commercial mission to deep space to go find an asteroid. And that one, they just announced yesterday that that mission was lost as well. So the takeaway for me across everything you just mentioned and the company I'm talking about Astrophorge is space is really hard, but we need to celebrate not necessarily the success of the end mission, but the success of the attempts, right? So by just making that attempt, putting kind putting your money where your mouth is and moving forward,

frankly, we're not just pushing the industry forward, we're pushing humanity forward, we're pushing all of human civilization forward. And being able to have a little bit of that risk tolerance and accept that, I think, is a really important part of how we do business. And that's part of the reason for APEX, why we try to offer such a robust and reliable product is we say, ours is just going to work. Put your risk, put the thing that you're testing more on the payload side. For our satellite buses, our platforms, we just want to be that robust, reliable supplier

you don't need to worry about. So you could go experiment with the things you want to experiment with. What do you think policy under this new administration and beyond looks like, whether it's from a space exploration standpoint or a defense standpoint or even just helping to reinvigorate and strengthen, fortify an industrial base? There's two main areas that we've thought a lot about. I think one is kind of what the space and specifically defense industry that touches space is going to look like.

We feel pretty confident that over the coming years, the investment into standing up to near-perior adversaries to put in more capabilities into orbit with things now like the Golden Dome, space-based interceptors that have been talked about and so on is going to be massive tailwinds for the defense industry that touches space. So we're very excited about that. I think the flip side of it is Doge, right? That is obviously kind of the elephant in the room

that everybody is looking at. We are really proud to offer everything that we do is firm fixed price contracts. I mean, the pricing is on the website, pay for it with a credit card. And the way that we do is firm fixed price contracts. I mean, the pricing is on the website, pay for it with a credit card. And the way that we see it is it enables the great companies that are out there, the great defense primes, the great payload manufacturers

to actually be more efficient, to spend less money because they are not gonna go into this cost plus non-recurring engineering world and have all these cost overruns if they're building their own satellite buses. So being able to use somebody like us, be very efficient, fast on that side, I think really helps enable what Doge is trying to do, while also letting us stand up to those near peer adversaries and invest more in defense. Are you working with some of those more traditional established defense primes specifically? Definitely, right. So we see ourselves as a merchant supplier of our satellite platforms. We cannot

name names right now, but there's a lot of household names that are our customers. Okay, and finally we just marked this milestone of one year in space. What's next for APEX? Two years in space, but no, it's what it really comes down to is continuing to deliver these satellite bus platforms for our customers a robust and reliable product that they can actually trust. So we're continuing to double down on production. Our factory, we're fully moved into and it should be at the ability to get to 100% rate and fully built out in the coming months. We'll do a nice office opening then.

And yeah, things are moving very quickly. So for us, it's just heads down, keep building satellite bus platforms and delivering it to customers. Ian Cinnamon of Apex Space, thank you so much for the time. Have a great one. Thank you. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime.

I'm Morgan Brennan.