Apex space just marked a milestone.

Its first satellite has now spent a year in orbit, and it's still working.

Something where it's very, very difficult for satellites to actually not just get up into orbit and work initially, but to work long-term in space.

And frankly, what's happened, I think, over the last five or ten years as the world

has shifted away from saying, let's launch one very big satellite to a lot of smaller satellites.

We're in a situation where a lot of those satellite vendors are, one, very slow at producing

their satellites, but two, it's very difficult to get a quality working product into orbit.

And passing that one-year milestone is one of the biggest indicators of kind of future success

of both that satellite and the same ones that are coming off that same production line.

CEO Ian Cinnamon co-founded Apex in 2022, with a purpose of manufacturing off-the-shelf satellite buses

that help customers shift risk and money

from making bespoke spacecraft to focusing on the missions they actually want to conduct.

The company is moving fast. It's partnering with other startups as well as industry stalwarts,

referenced on this podcast by Anderil executives as part of that company's team of, quote,

super friends, establishing a new

American industrial base last month apex added a 46 million dollar US Space

Force contract to its books as well fundamentally the way we see ourselves is we're

a defense company that happens to be operating in the space domain and most of the

customers that we work with are you know great defense crimes like andrell is most of the customers that we work with are, you know,

great defense crimes like Andrel is a wonderful partner of ours. We work with a variety of

commercial companies as well who do some work with the government. And then, of course, we do

some work directly with the government like the contract that you're referencing. On this episode,

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