LOS ANGELES – Italian space company Argotec announced plans Oct. 11 to invests $25 million in a producing facility in Maryland that can employ greater than 60 people designing, constructing, testing and operating satellites.
“It’s vital to be near our customers,” David Avino, Argotec CEO and founder, told SpaceNews on the Space Economy Summit here. “At the identical time, we wish to be a U.S. company.”
The primary product from the brand new Largo, Maryland, facility can be a software-defined radio. Argotec will work with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to create a streamlined version of the Universal Space Transponder-Lite radio for high-speed communications services in deep space. Following the prototype phase for the software-defined UST-Lite, Argotec plans to expand production for industrial space customers.
Managing director of the brand new facility, Corbett Hoenninger, was a senior vp of engineer at Sierra Space and a United Space Alliance flight controller and astronaut trainer.
ArgoMoon and LICIACube
Within the last couple of years, Argotec gained recognition for 2 cubesats sent to deep space: ArgoMoon, which launched on the Artemis Exploration Mission 1 in 2022, and LICIACube, which collected imagery of the ejecta plume from NASA’s 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test. On the SmallSat Conference in Utah in August, LICIACube won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Small Satellite Mission of the Yr award.
ArgoMoon and LICIACube show the reliability and performance of Argotec satellites, Avino said. Based on that technology, Argotec plans to fabricate communications and Earth-observation satellites for constellations.
Up to now, Argotec has worked extensively with the Italian Space Agency, the European Space Agency and NASA. For the long run, “we’re targeting also industrial customers,” Avino said.
UST-Lite, originally developed by JPL, combines a miniature radio with advanced processing to facilitate long-distance data transmission and reception.
In July, Argotec unveiled its recent SpacePark, a facility in Turin, Italy, designed to provide one satellite per week.