We envisioned Comet at Apex’s inception— over 3.5 years ago. As we’ve worked to build our small and medium platforms, Aries and Nova, we’ve laid the foundation for Comet.
As we’ve grown, we’ve vertically integrated more and more components, allowing us to reduce risk and hold schedule for Comet. Comet, designed for LEO environments, brings the price point of power and mass down significantly, ushering in new use cases such as Orbital Data Centers, discerning government missions, and more.
Today, we unveil more details: Comet Mini, built for today’s launchers like Falcon 9, is based on our vertically integrated power system and generates 20kW of power, supporting masses up to 3,000kg in custom launch configurations. In our standard launch configurations, we can fit 16 in a Falcon 9, allowing our government and commercial constellation customers to rapidly reach orbit.
Comet XL, built for Starship, is where things get really interesting. But more on that soon!
𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺 𝗨𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲
From Day 0, Apex envisioned a product roadmap spanning different sizes of satellite bus platforms: Aries for smaller payloads supporting sensing and pathfinder missions; Nova as our proliferated constellation workhorse; and Comet, a higher-mass, higher-power platform for customers launching constellations with more demanding payloads.
Comet meets the demands of power-hungry missions through a variety of configurations that support everything from orbital data centers to communications, radar, and space-based interceptor hosting. Leveraging heritage from our Nova platform, which is now in rate production with numerous buses going to customers this year, Comet's two configurations (Comet Mini and Comet XL) share common, vertically integrated subsystems across avionics, solar arrays, power systems, and propulsion.
This product-first approach is what Apex was founded on, and it is fundamental to scaling manufacturing. When combined with our design-for-manufacturing principles, productization continues to deliver radically improved speed, reliability, and constellation access for our customers.