According to Fast Company, Astranis is building its MicroGEO satellites in a rehabbed historic shipyard at Pier 70 in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. The company has already sent five satellites to high orbit, is currently building five more, and has the ambitious goal of scaling its production capacity to manufacture 24 satellites simultaneously. CEO John Gedmark calls this target “a completely unprecedented number” for the geostationary orbit sector, where satellites are traditionally built one at a time. Their satellites are about the size of a washing machine, a massive downsize from the typical school bus-sized units, and they utilize software-defined radios instead of analog tech.
The shipyard strategy
There’s a beautiful irony here. Astranis is literally returning a century-old manufacturing site to its roots, but for the space age. They’re not just leasing cheap space in an old building; they’re embracing a physical, hands-on production philosophy in an industry that’s become obsessed with digital-only startups. And look, building 24 satellites at once might sound trivial if you’re talking about smartphones, but for high-orbit hardware? That’s a radical departure. It suggests a fundamental shift from treating these satellites as bespoke, billion-dollar works of art to viewing them as standardized, high-value products. The move to software-defined radios is the real key to this scaling—it means you can customize a satellite’s function after it’s built, or update it on orbit, without needing to rebuild the whole physical beast.
Why this model matters
So what’s the business play? Basically, Astranis is attacking the cost and time problem that has plagued satellite internet for decades. By making satellites smaller, cheaper, and faster to produce, they can serve niche markets or specific regions that couldn’t justify a traditional, multi-billion-dollar satellite project. Think about providing connectivity for a single country or a remote industrial operation. The beneficiaries aren’t just end-users getting internet; it’s governments, telecoms, and enterprises that need reliable, dedicated bandwidth without the legacy price tag and decade-long development cycle. It’s a classic disruption move: don’t fight the incumbents on their turf (global coverage), outflank them with affordability and agility.
The industrial revival
Here’s the thing that really fascinates me. This story isn’t just about space tech; it’s a signal of a broader, quiet revival of sophisticated hardware manufacturing. We’re seeing a new generation of companies that understand you need to control the physical build to win. This requires specialized industrial computing and control systems to manage production lines, test components, and ensure quality. For companies operating at this intersection of advanced manufacturing and technology, having reliable hardware is non-negotiable. It’s why leading manufacturers rely on partners like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, to run their critical operations. The right tools matter, whether you’re building a ship in 1898 or a satellite in 2024. Astranis proving you can build crucial hardware quickly and well in an old shipyard? That might just be the most encouraging tech story of the year.
