Aerospacelab Scales Its Vision of Manufacturing: Interview With CEO Benoît Deper

Things are picking up rapidly for Belgium-based satellite manufacturer Aerospacelab. This year alone the company launched four demonstration satellites on the Transporter-10 rideshare mission, broke ground on a new mega factory in Belgium, acquired AMOS, and signed a pivotal contract with MDA to provide subsystems for the Aurora constellation line.

CEO and founder Benoît Deper spoke with Via Satellite about how the company is looking to shake up the satellite manufacturing market in both Europe and the U.S. Deper talks about how vertical integration is key to the company’s strategy, and the challenge of staying true to the company’s roots as a startup while attempting to scale.

VIA SATELLITE: Take me back to the beginning of Aerospacelab. Why did you decide to start the company?

Deper: In the 2009 to 2011 timeframe, I was pursuing my master’s degree in France and I ended up as a student intern at NASA Ames. My bosses were Chris Boshuizen and Will Marshall from Planet, they were working at NASA back then. I was working on cubesats that were among the first to be officially sponsored by NASA. It was a really cool internship. I worked on flight software and [learned] fast iteration, agile space.

For family reasons I went back to Europe and started to work at the European Space Agency (ESA) in the Netherlands. I went from tiny cubesats in Cupertino with Bay Area-minded people to civil servants working big ESA missions. It was a shock to me.

After I left I ended up doing hypersonics in Switzerland, not related to space. When this project ended I was in business school and I wondered ‘Why am I doing this?’ I wasn’t ready to join a consultancy or a big space firm. I wanted to do smallsats again. I ended up starting Aerospacelab in December of 2017. I was bored and I didn’t find a work environment that fit my needs and what I thought the market in Europe needed.

VIA SATELLITE: How much has the company grown in the last few years?

Deper: We’ve grown quite a lot. Six years and a couple of months later we are now 350 employees and will reach 400 by the end of 2024. We have developed a fully vertically integrated portfolio of subsystems and launched eight satellites. We started with the high end of cubesats and soon went to 100 to 250 kilogram spacecraft. We have six of those in orbit.

It was a risky move especially in the beginning. Since day one I have been stubborn with vertical integration. We want to master the whole supply chain and do most, if not everything in-house. VCs and early board members saw that as a risk of dilution of capital and efforts. We wanted to do a lot of in-orbit demonstrations to show we could prove flight heritage. Now we are moving out of that phase with great results in orbit.

This win with MDA is a pivotal moment for the company. Affordable or cheap satellites often connote not meeting the quality assurance requirements of the ‘big boys.’ In this case we had an extensive due diligence process. It's the first seal of approval of a very demanding customer. It allows us to transition to something that is outside of the New Space mantra. We are going halfway between primes and New Space.

[It shows that] a company as established as MDA that is trusted by the most demanding customers, that our engineering office and production plan and quality processes we have in place meet those requirements. This is the biggest win, [more than the] financial aspect of the contract.

VIA SATELLITE: Aerospacelab launched four satellites on the SpaceX Transporter-10 mission in March. How are those satellites performing now?

Deper: Three of the satellites are RF [radio frequency] sensing satellites, scanning spectrum to find interesting stuff. Those satellites are working fine and we have a lot of traction with this kind of data. The fourth satellite is high-resolution imaging. We are going to publish some samples of the data we have collected soon. There is a bottleneck in the supply chain for this kind of imagery so I expect we will have a lot of traction for this type of satellite.

VIA SATELLITE: Did Aerospacelab build the sensors for those satellites?

Deper: Yes, we have the capabilities to build payloads. We had in-house capabilities, but we expanded those with the acquisition of AMOS. They are one of the leaders in Europe in optics manufacturing for space. We have the capability to do payloads and we are chasing a couple of customers that would contract us for satellite bus and payload and testing.

VIA SATELLITE: Do you offer a standardized line of satellite buses?

Deper: It’s a mess! The main idea was to develop a standardized satellite bus that we would cut and paste everywhere. This has limitations. Full standardization is good for price attractiveness. Customers come in saying ‘This is affordable, but I want this, this, and this customized’ and then it starts to become a nightmare. Customization may look harmless but there’s a snowball effect and it’s a lot of effort to adapt. We have customers on the other end of the spectrum that are custom from day one, but it is super expensive.

A few months ago, we tried to see if we could redraw the boundary between what is custom and what is standardized. We have a satellite bus that fits every [rideshare] plate at SpaceX. It's optimized toward the total cost of ownership for the rideshare customer. But if you look at what’s inside the satellite bus, we share 80 percent of the subsystems in the whole rideshare range of platforms.

What we want to achieve is that each satellite is customized, but customized with building blocks that are standardized. The next flight that will use the new buses will fly next year. We also have demand for non-rideshare customers, custom constellations.

VIA SATELLITE: What does your prospective customer base look like? Is it European or international? Government or commercial?

Deper: Customers we are chasing include Y Combinator startup accelerator alumni ordering subsystems for their first satellite, to work as a contractor for primes on constellation missions. We have a bit of the full spectrum. Some customers have a payload and a business model and just need a bus, integration, and launch.

We see more and more governments want to have their own capabilities in space. We have quite a lot of traction with medium- to small-governments in Europe that are willing to play with a few satellites and start building an operational environment like the Space Force.

A huge expansion for us would be to play more in the telecom market as a component or bus provider. We are assessing broadband, direct-to-device, LEO and other orbits. MEO has some interesting features and GEO as well. Not a lot of players are going there because there are some technology challenges. This is the kind of expansion we are studying.

VIA SATELLITE: Satellite manufacturing is a fairly competitive market with a number of established New Space players in both Europe and the U.S. How do you see your position amid the competitive market?

Deper: When I look at the competition, it looks like we are the most vertically integrated in Europe. Certain companies are doing great in the cubesat-plus segment. I’m not sure that is where the money is. The trends are not going toward smaller satellites anymore, it’s bigger and bigger, driven by launch costs coming down with the minimum order quantity going up, along with power-hungry payloads.

In Europe, no one is really addressing this market yet. The incumbent New Space players are focusing on cubesats and slowly going up to 100 kilograms. But the market seems to aim for 1 ton now. The big manufacturers like Airbus, Thales, and OHB are not in great shape if you look at recent news. It’s like a catch-22. They don’t invest in new product lines until the market is clearly asking. But once they pull the trigger, they are too late.

In the U.S., we see competition among those who have been selected at various levels of tranches for Space Development Agency vehicles. But again, most of them are not that vertically integrated, they are still buying a lot of subsystems.

VIA SATELLITE: Why does vertical integration help you compete?

Deper: Vertical integration is not only a way to reduce cost but it's a way to get more performance out of the satellite with optimization. One example is if you need 10 subsystems and you buy them from 10 different vendors you end up with 10 boxes with cables between them. Most of those boxes have some compute hardware. You could reduce the number of FPGAs [field programmable gate arrays] or CPUs [central processing units] by converting the software functions on a smaller amount of chip. But this is super difficult to do if you are buying those boxes, because nobody is willing to open the design and share the IP in a joint tradeoff to rationalize the architecture.

The best example of this is SpaceX. If you look at the Starlink satellites, they do not look like regular satellites. I believe most of this is because they have very good people, but they have a lot of vertical integration. They can reshape the satellite architecture and line the IP out on a table and say ‘How do we combine this in the most efficient way?’ That’s what we are aiming at.

The rest of the ‘secret sauce’ is that we have a pretty big catalog of radiation screened EE automotive grade parts. In Europe we have probably the largest database of screened radiation components. Instead of using space radiation hardened EE chips, we mostly use automotive grade ones that are screened with radiation testing ones. This is quite common in New Space, but what is uncommon is to have a 100 percent screening ratio.

We test every part in an ESA sanctioned particle accelerator that we have access to. It allows us to have a quality assurance level that is usually required by primes. The combination of both allows us to be quite competitive in the market.

VIA SATELLITE: What kinds of deals do you hope to sign in the next two years?

Deper: Being a trusted partner that can deliver critical subsystems for telecom constellations is something we want to expand. Instead of one subsystem, we want to do four, five, six subsystems. We want to translate some of the business-to-government relationships with MoDs into them buying assets from us.

We are also expanding into the U.S. with a surgical entry into U.S. government programs where we feel we can bring value. We are looking into a new way of doing things. This is why we started the subsidiary with Tina [Ghataore] as the CEO. It’s moving pretty fast, we have a big factory in the pipeline in the U.S. that will be announced at the end of summer.

VIA SATELLITE: Has most of your revenue so far been from subsystems?

Deper: We have three lines of revenue — engineering contracts, subsystem sales, and satellite sales. Up to now engineering contracts led revenue, but now we see a shift where satellites are in the lead, followed by subsystems, and then engineering contracts.

VIA SATELLITE: What are your biggest challenges to growing Aerospacelab?

Deper: Growing, but growing in a nice way. We had an expansion in 2022 and realized that we had more people who had been with the company for less than six months than who had been with the company from the beginning. Company culture is at risk every time we have a surge in people coming in. We are hiring people that are either fresh out of school with no prior space experience who are not able to contribute yet because they don’t know space. And the ones that come in from Airbus or Thales or space agencies come with a legacy understanding which is not necessarily what we share as a vision. If you hire too many too fast, we become Thales overnight. I spend most of my days making sure we stay true to our values and our work.

On the execution side, we are starting to have bigger customers with higher stakes. We need to step up and make sure we can grow our revenue stream and keep the quality assurance where it is now. The challenge is to deliver on time, keeping the quality control at the same time.

VIA SATELLITE: How do you describe the space startup scene in Belgium?

Deper: Belgium is a small country so we don’t have many space startups. There are three to four other startups and most are capped at five to 10 people. There’s definitely improvement in venture capital access. At first it was software VCs that wanted returns in six months. Now we have a few VCs focused on deep tech and some on space as well. It’s catching up to the U.S. but there’s still a lot to be done in Europe.

In Europe, we need old money to be interested in this. It’s starting to move in that direction. We haven’t reached critical mass in space entrepreneurship in Europe yet to really have champions emerging. The way procurement is done in Europe is different than in the U.S. because of the way ESA works. As a former ESA staffer, I have a pretty strong opinion on what works and what works less well.

VIA SATELLITE: What do you think the European space market needs to jumpstart growth?

Deper: The public customers like ESA and EUMETSAT and space agencies should find a way to manage themselves so we can reach critical mass. SpaceX’s starting point was a $1.6 billion [NASA] contract in 2008 that kickstarted their growth to the behemoth it is today.

I insist on procurement — buying a service or hardware — and not R&D grants. ESA is not able to do that because of the way it was built. The constitution of ESA would need to be changed so we can have a central market where ESA has a competition and the winner takes all. If you do that often, we will have multiple vendors winning. Stop sprinkling and focus procurement on sizable chunks. You will have sizable companies emerge from this. Many startups in Europe say this has to be done.

But members are willing to put money into ESA if they get the money back with jobs within their national boundaries. So, it’s tough for ESA to get rid of this rule, it would be a political shift at the EU-level. That’s above my pay grade and I’m not sure it will ever happen. The risk/reward balance is biased toward not moving. VS