Once upon a time, San Francisco was a manufacturing town. For decades, the Union Iron Works built ships—such as the US Navy’s USS Oregon (1893) and USS Wisconsin (1898)—in its plant on Pier 70 in the neighborhood now known as Dogpatch. In recent years, that sprawling, long-abandoned complex has been rehabbed and filled with office space, housing, retail, and art studios. Among its tenants are startup accelerator Y Combinator and HR platform Gusto, neither of which has much in common with the Union Iron Works.
And then there’s Astranis. The company is returning Pier 70 to its roots by applying human labor to turn raw materials into finished products. The products in question happen to be high-orbit satellites. Astranis has sent five of them into space, is currently building five more, and intends to scale up its capacity to manufacture 24 at a time.
Now, by the standards of consumer electronics, cranking out 24 of something may not sound like a feat. For satellites, however, it’s “a completely unprecedented number for geostationary and high orbits, where these satellites have historically been built one at a time,” says Astranis cofounder and CEO John Gedmark.
Astranis’s breakthrough isn’t just about speed of production. Its MicroGEO satellites are remarkably compact—about the size of a commercial washing machine, downsized from typical school bus-sized units. They are designed to be affordable, in an industry where cost overruns in the billions have been common. Rather than relying on analog technology, they use software-defined radios, which make customization and updates far more practical.
