Meet Amanda Mosinski, AI&T Technician III at Apex! Amanda brings over a decade of hands-on manufacturing experience to Apex. She kicked off her career machining V8 and V6 Turbo engines at Toyota Motor Manufacturing before making the leap into aerospace at Blue Origin. She began her time at Blue Origin running vibe testing, thermal and cryogenic testing, and proof/flow testing, then moved into final assembly and integration for the BE-4 rocket engines, where she supported hot fire testing at MSFC 4670. When she stumbled on an opportunity at Apex, she couldn’t turn it down, driving 2,000 miles from Alabama to California to join the team. Today, Amanda works as an Assembly, Integration & Test (AI&T) Technician supporting bus builds from base deck to finished, flight-ready spacecraft. Technicians like Amanda are the backbone of Apex’s mass-manufacturing strategy, executing the mechanical assembly, integration, and testing that transforms components into complete satellite platforms. Their work on the line is what ensures Apex hits rate, meets customer demand, and delivers mission success in orbit. Learn more about Amanda here: Want to build flight hardware alongside Amanda and Apex’s team of highly skilled technicians? Check out our open production roles:

The recent Transporter-17 launch was a big day for Apex. We put four Apex spacecraft into orbit: three customer-owned Aries platforms and one Apex-owned testbed Nova platform. All three Aries spacecraft are operating nominally, and commissioning continues ahead of schedule. These buses represent a major milestone for our customers, who are using them to support critical missions. We’re excited to reveal more details on those missions in the coming months. The Nova testbed platform performed as planned through its early mission: it separated cleanly from the launch vehicle, powered on, booted the flight computer, deployed both solar arrays successfully, and entered a GNC-controlled safe state before transitioning into a hold state, awaiting first contact. Unfortunately, we have not yet established communications with the test spacecraft. The Apex team is working to understand the issue and establish communications with Nova. The very purpose of Nova’s pathfinder mission is to surface issues and prove out vehicle performance before our customer missions. Apex is already set to launch the second ​Nova testbed platform in the coming months, before flying any customer missions. This rapid mission cadence enables Apex’s risk-on approach for rapidly developing and testing pathfinder satellite platforms to ensure customer-owned platforms maintain 100% on-orbit success. This is the Apex way: to develop new platforms at unprecedented speed, Apex intentionally accepts higher risk on initial self-funded flights of testbed vehicles to prove out design and performance. Once these systems fly successfully in orbit, our customers are ready to fly them with confidence. For our customers’ spacecraft, reliability is everything, and we treat it that way. The next Nova is already in production, with our launch coming up in just a matter of months. We will apply learnings from this first mission, make the necessary changes for increased reliability, and fly again before any Nova customer mission. We are immensely proud of the Apex team for the three customer-owned Aries platforms now operating successfully in orbit, and thankful to our partners for their continued support. We will share more updates on all four spacecraft as we confirm additional information. (Thanks to our friends @vantortech for the great NEI shots of Nova!)

What is a satellite platform, and why does it matter for the future of space? Apex Co-Founder & CEO @IanCinnamon joined @suffiyanmalikk on @WeThe_Builders at @RonaldReagan's National Economic Forum to dig into the thesis behind Apex, how productized platforms allow for faster, more scalable production – and what that means for Apex's customers. Full episode here:

New pod alert: Apex CEO & Co-Founder @IanCinnamon sat down with @itsmoislam of @payloadspace a few weeks back to unpack why the biggest bottleneck in space is no longer launch; it's the spacecraft itself. After Ian sold his first company to Palantir, he and now Co-Founder Max Benassi saw the problem up close: rockets were getting cheaper and payloads more capable, but satellite buses were still being built as bespoke engineering projects. Apex's answer was simple in theory, incredibly difficult in practice: turn spacecraft into products. Four years in, Apex is delivering standardized platforms for critical commercial and national security missions, and making good on the promise to bring true productization to the satellite industry. In the episode, Ian digs into: – Why spacecraft should be products, not one-off programs – Whether the bus market is underbuilt or heading toward oversupply – How Apex approaches manufacturing, vertical integration, and scale – Why bigger satellites may make more sense in a world of cheap launch – The capital strategy behind Apex's rapid growth Link to the full episode ⤵️

Why is a satellite like a race car? @FortuneMagazine's @agarfinks has the answer in her recent piece on Apex’s partnership with @ToyotaRacingUSA. Leveraging the same precision manufacturing practices used to craft world-class racing engines, Toyota is helping Apex scale by mass-producing precision-machined parts for our Apex satellite platforms. “We have to think about manufacturing from the perspective of not just how we build something, but how we build it when we’re factoring in all the variables that matter—quality, speed of production, and affordability,” said @IanCinnamon. “Too often we say, ‘Oh, we can build a bunch.’ Well, how long does it take? Or, ‘We can build them really cheap.’ Okay, but are they high-quality? We need to find the middle ground between those core elements. And if we can do that, the U.S. manufacturing base can really fall into its stride.” Read the full story here:

Apex is proud to supply its Nova platform to @LoftOrbital, expanding their off-the-shelf portfolio for future customer missions requiring increased size, weight, and power (SWaP). These missions include proliferated, power-hungry national security applications such as advanced sensing, high-throughput communications, and missile warning/tracking. Under the agreement, Apex will deliver up to 10 Nova platforms, with the first scheduled for delivery later this year. Link to full story here:

Nova-1 is set to deploy from @SpaceX's Transporter-17 just after midnight tonight. As the first Nova in orbit, Nova-1 will serve as a flying testbed, proving out the Nova platform architecture and the vertically integrated tech stack (power, avionics, solar, flight software) that will underpin all future Apex platforms. Nova mission success has been divided into three discrete phases, each with a clearly defined set of objectives that will help prove Nova’s readiness as a true constellation workhorse. Phase 1: Minimum Viable Product Establish communications and confirm power-positivity. Platform is healthy in orbit. Phase 2: Crossing the Threshold Continue platform commissioning. Power on payloads and downlink data. Phase 3: Fully Operational Space Platform Complete platform commissioning. Begin Project Shadow commissioning and mission ops. Pushing the Limit Following Project Shadow, Apex will continue testing the limits of Nova’s performance on orbit. Stay tuned for more mission updates over the next several weeks.