Astranis creates small low-orbit satellites to provide critical internet and phone connectivity to specific regions that lack support. Over the last two years the company has sold over $1.2 billion in satellite services.
The fast-growing space company is using ION Factory Operating System (OS) to rapidly and cost-effectively build, test, iterate, and launch its satellites.
The turnkey software platform empowers its engineering and manufacturing teams to customize their factory operations, automate core processes (like testing), and scale production quickly and reliably.
The world isn’t as connected as people think. Over 4 billion people lack access to the internet or telecommunications. Astranis is on a mission to change that
The space company builds low-cost, high-speed internet satellites to serve areas deprived of telecom access.
Unlike traditional geostationary (GEO) satellites—which can take years and billions of dollars to launch—Astranis can launch a single MicroGEO Sat at one fifteenth the mass, at a fraction of the cost, in under a year.
The critical products that Astranis develops require a highly customized approach to managing work, including rigorous testing of the whole system and every component within it. Astranis administers a huge quantity of tests (and tests within tests), amounting to thousands of tests per satellite, which generates a lot of data to be interpreted.
The step-by-step processes and the volume of parts (hundreds of thousands) involved in a product’s end-to-end development must be trackable including all of the materials, machines, and components involved.
Astranis uses the ION Factory Operating System (OS) to manage the production of its satellites, provide full traceability from start to finish and beyond, and securely manage its data.
The thousands of tests that Astranis performs on each satellite, which form the foundation of meticulous assessments, are organized and managed efficiently in ION, with its data clearly structured and easy to access.
Because the back end of ION is accessible to its users, Astranis can leverage ION’s open API to automatically gather test results and create reports, dashboards, and summaries, freeing up about 50% of their engineers’ time. They no longer need to spend hours sitting at computers, pressing buttons, and interpreting results.
All tests and build steps conducted through ION are now 100% traceable at a granular level; a necessity for mission-critical satellites with compliance requirements. If a component works individually but fails once integrated into the satellite, engineers can effortlessly backtrack to unit tests to determine root causes.
Because all actions are automatically tracked, they can see everything that’s happened in the build steps, down to the smallest detail. Thanks to ION’s open API, if they need to find something specific where there’s no out-of-the-box report, they can write an SQL query to locate the information they’re looking for.
It’s also made auditing much easier; the supply chain team can now access customized dashboards for insights into resources and purchasing.
Quality control is handled through non-conformance issue ticketing in ION. This function proved invaluable when iterating the design of new components - a common occurrence in the fast-paced space industry.
Since using ION, they have improved their ticketing process, which is critical for quality control. So, when there’s a problem with a part or a process, or something that could be improved, ION provides them an organized and traceable way of managing the issues.
Astranis is making incredible progress on its noble and important mission to make information accessible to everyone in the world, regardless of location or economic status. Astranis customers provide critical telecommunications services in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Thailand, the sPhilippines, and beyond.
Supported by ION, Astranis now has a radically flexible and extensible platform that can easily flex to meet the needs of an evolving, growing operation.