By: Laban Gabbidon and Alyssa Lafleur
The Space Insider team traveled to Colorado Springs for the 40th Space Symposium—an annual gathering that unites commercial, civil, and defense stakeholders across the space industry. Between keynote sessions and exhibit-hall walk-arounds, the team had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Cassidy and Mark Krebs, chief executive officer and vice president of guidance and control, respectively, of the newly formed D-Orbit USA, and Jeff Gilbert, chief executive officer of Spectrum Advanced Manufacturing Technologies (Spectrum AMT).
The conversation explored how each leader plans to merge agile, Silicon Valley–style iteration with heritage-grade manufacturing discipline, and what that blend means for the next wave of satellite constellations. Their insights extend beyond a single partnership, offering a candid look at the broader challenges and opportunities that high-reliability manufacturing now faces as launch capacity expands and mission cadence accelerates.
The Partnership at a Glance
Spectrum AMT and D-Orbit USA announced their manufacturing alliance in early 2025, staking out a shared goal: accelerate the production of high-reliability satellite buses for commercial and government customers. Under the agreement, Spectrum will manage material procurement, printed-circuit-board assembly (PCBA), harness fabrication, and final system integration. D-Orbit USA will provide the bus architecture, test regimes, and mission-specific design updates.
Mike Cassidy, CEO of D-Orbit USA, explained. “We know how to design scalable satellites; Spectrum knows how to manufacture them at high quality and low cost,” he said. Jeff Gilbert, Spectrum’s CEO, agreed: “You can usually tell on the first call if there’s alignment—and we had it. We share the same philosophy.” That shared outlook revolves around speed, transparency, and a refusal to compromise on reliability—factors Cassidy, Krebs, and Gilbert all claim the market increasingly demands.
From Deep Heritage to Agile Growth
Spectrum AMT cut its teeth on marquee NASA missions like the James Webb Space Telescope, the Parker Solar Probe, and the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover. Over 28 years, the California-based manufacturer has refined processes for soldering, conformal coating, and environmental stress screening—skills that translate directly to satellite-bus production. “Our AS9100-certified techs include NASA-qualified trainers,” Gilbert said. “Every satellite bus is different, and we treat them that way.”
D-Orbit USA, by contrast, is the year-old American subsidiary of Italy’s D-Orbit Group, which has already flown 17 successful ION orbital-transfer missions. The U.S. outfit zeroes in on bus design and carries a management roster that reads like a cross-section of New Space: former SpaceX, OneWeb, Starlink, and Kuiper engineers alongside veterans of propulsion start-ups. Krebs previously ran attitude-control, flight-dynamics, and vehicle-integration for both Starlink and Kuiper, steering each constellation from architecture to first-launch success, while Cassidy’s own résumé spans Google’s Project Loon and electric-thruster firm Apollo Fusion, giving him a vantage point on both Silicon Valley speed and aerospace rigor.
Aligning Design and Production
The crux of the alliance lies in integrating D-Orbit’s iterative design cycles with Spectrum’s disciplined manufacturing culture. Mark Krebs, D-Orbit USA’s vice president of guidance and control, spelled out the handshake: “We’ll be providing the designs, procedures, and lessons learned; Spectrum will be delivering the team and the facility to make that work efficiently at scale.”
For Gilbert, that efficiency begins with early mock-ups. “We’re doing fit-ups in-house, retrofitting wiring, bringing D-Orbit engineers onto our floor,” he said. By pairing D-Orbit’s hardware-in-the-loop test benches with Spectrum’s environmental-stress chambers, the partners expect to catch integration issues before they reach flight hardware. Cassidy added a blunt rationale: “There are so many tragic mission failures from small, dumb mistakes. Building in layers of protection—design experience and test experience—gives you a much higher probability of surviving that first two hours in orbit.”
Building the Factory for Tomorrow
Spectrum is midway through renovating 7,500 square feet of new space that includes a 2,000-square-foot ISO 8 cleanroom capable of hosting four satellite buses simultaneously. The company’s longer-term plan calls for an 80,000-square-foot campus with room for 20–30 buses on the floor at any time. “That’s how you drive efficiency and bring down costs,” Gilbert said.
Physical infrastructure, however, is only part of the equation. Spectrum is automating traceability with a manufacturing-execution system that tags each board and harness to its inspection records, a requirement for both NASA and U.S. Department of Defense programs. D-Orbit USA will plug its digital twin and fault-injection models into Spectrum’s shop-floor data, allowing design engineers to tweak tolerances while the production line runs. “We want factory-style throughput without sacrificing flight heritage,” Cassidy explained.
Engineering Reliability into Every Bus
Reliability begins with parts selection. D-Orbit USA front-loads radiation analysis—heavy-ion and proton testing—during the component-pick phase rather than after prototypes are built. “Some competitors skip that step or roll the dice—we don’t,” Cassidy said. For missions beyond low-Earth orbit, the company collaborates with radiation-services providers to validate parts against GEO and high-elliptical environments.
Spectrum complements that approach with workmanship discipline honed on deep-space programs. Each solder joint undergoes automated optical inspection, X-ray validation, and, when required, destructive physical analysis. Gilbert pointed to repeatability metrics: “Our goal is zero rework after environmental test. That saves both time and risk.” When rework does occur, root-cause findings feed back into operator training and design-for-manufacture checklists shared with D-Orbit engineers.
Workforce Culture as a Competitive Edge
All three leaders frame talent as their ultimate differentiator. Spectrum has doubled headcount in three years yet claims to keep turnover below industry averages by granting employees a stake in profits. “If you cut someone in on the bottom line, you don’t have to tell them what to do,” Gilbert said. The company also offers tuition reimbursement and cross-training that allows assemblers to rotate through inspection and test roles—an approach that builds redundancy and flexibility into production schedules.
At D-Orbit USA, incentives skew toward rapid iteration. Engineers receive budget authority to run sub-scale prototypes early, with clear performance gates that trigger full-scale builds. “In the private sector, you can’t afford bureaucracy,” Krebs said. “As a founder or investor, you won’t tolerate it. That forces you to build better, faster, and more efficiently.”
Toward an Industrial-Grade Space Supply Chain
Today’s spacecraft still rely on what Krebs called “Swiss-watch-level” components: reaction wheels, star trackers, torque rods, computers, and batteries produced in low volume. “We need aircraft-level quantities so spacecraft start costing like aircraft,” he said.
Both companies view supply-chain transparency and early test insertion as keys. Spectrum’s manufacturing-execution system tags each board to its inspection history; D-Orbit plans to extend its test scripts upstream so suppliers run the same hardware-in-the-loop cycles during development. “Long-term, we want to push our tests out to suppliers, not just once the hardware hits our bench,” Cassidy explained.
The Commercial–Government Balance
While both companies welcome government contracts, Cassidy expects commercial demand to drive their volume ramp. “We’re seeing more and more success in the commercial space,” he said. “SpaceX is proof. I think commercial companies will keep leading, with government following.” Still, the partnership remains mindful of regulatory compliance—ITAR, EAR, and cybersecurity maturity model certification (CMMC) requirements are baked into Spectrum’s documentation control.
For government primes, D-Orbit USA positions its buses as modular platforms that can host classified or proprietary payloads without exposing sensitive software to outside vendors. Spectrum’s secure-build segregations and RFID-badge access zones support that model. “The hardware might be unclassified, but the data flow needs protection,” Gilbert noted.
Looking Ahead: Manufacturing for the Starship Economy
Cassidy sees SpaceX’s Starship as a near-term inflection point. “When launch capacity jumps and cost per kilogram drops, the pressure to shave every gram disappears,” he said. “We’ll shift to higher rates— dozens of buses per month—which means robotic assembly, automated inspection, and lithography-style throughput.”
Spectrum is preparing by pre-qualifying collaborative robots for harness routing and conformal-coat masking. The company is also evaluating automated optical-inspection algorithms that learn from flight-heritage defect libraries supplied by D-Orbit USA. Gilbert summed up the ambition: “True vertical integration costs billions. Partnering with D-Orbit, which already understands the upstream supply chain, lets us focus on what we do best—receiving components, inspecting them, and integrating them efficiently.”
Longer term, all three executives predict an orbital-logistics ecosystem that mirrors terrestrial freight networks, complete with in-orbit refueling, repair depots, and autonomous transfer vehicles. “Why not a business park in orbit? Honeymoon in space? Mining the Moon?” Krebs mused. Whether those visions materialize, the immediate objective remains clear: deliver flight-ready satellite buses on schedule, at a price the market will bear, ultimately, helping the satellite industry meet the unprecedented demand looming on the horizon.
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