By improving design times by orders of magnitude, VXB is revolutionizing the capital requirements of hardware engineering from the ground up.
Spacecraft engineering is arduous, technically demanding, and is found in one of the most design intensive industries globally. In the immortal words of Dan Jablonsky, “We’re not making toothpaste.” A representative 400 kg Small Sat might have a price tag of $15M, require roughly 100k hours of design and systems level engineering work, and see an ultimate design cycle that demands 12-24 months and up to $5M of the total satellite budget. Suffice to say, it’s a huge operational effort that demands the full attention of the talented staff executing towards it. This massive logistical commitment is one that VXB Aerospace has been building toolsets to assuage directly! Their technological and engineering tool set is focused on providing an order of magnitude improvement in both timeline and capital costs to the design and innovation stage of hardware engineering and development! VXB enters the market on the back of their Seed round funding of $4M led by Dauntless Ventures. Their fundraise positions VXB to execute on some of their existing contracts and scale up capacity to service a wider customer base. They’ve achieved meaningful traction in both the Australian and Pacific markets and are looking at growing and strengthening their US presence in that same time.
The solution set that VXB brings to bear for their customers is a fundamental software product that allows users to rapidly test and experiment with a wide variety of different component designs and configurations that solve the mission needs. This is able to function meaningfully at the component and subsystem levels and is expanding its capability to include the system (and ultimately the spacecraft level) in their entirety. VXB does this through their proprietary modeling, simulation, and analysis software that allows for them to rapidly check and iterate thousands of different potential design configurations and recommend the strongest candidates to the client for further and deeper analysis and design. VXB has already proven in their initial deployments meaningful and material capability improvements to existing heritage designs while simultaneously improving the manufacturability and cycle time for the entirety of the design and engineering cycle. VXB’s momentum from their seed raise and the current contracts / awards they currently have to execute positions them well for a potential raise, striking while the iron is hot, and using the additional funding to rapidly scale up their operations to meet the demand they can service. VXB does not plan on integrating vertically outside of the engineering software toolset, though they have already built some meaningful relationships with manufacturers themselves, allowing for their clients who may lack such bespoke manufacturing capabilities themselves to partner with the manufacturers who can assemble truly innovative and novel component configurations.
As launch costs and the capital barriers to entry in space continue to lower, the number of players entering the Space industry will continue to increase. The industry’s focus on scaling hardware capability and infrastructure in large part to serve the growing demands of national security and orbital compute / commercial high-power-missions means that we’ll have an exponential growth in the amount of novel engineering work and non-renewable engineering design that needs to go into the extensive set of solutions necessary for bridging those hurdles. The market is well primed for further tools that will expedite that process, as investors have become more hardware tolerant in recent years, but the market’s ability to absorb and support the capital needs that this future state of the Space industry has remains limited; further capital reductions are going to be necessary. We would expect to see a bevy of hardware entities growing in the industry all contributing to solving the challenges necessary to get 100kW class assets on orbit. The engineering and design barriers to entry have always been wholly dependent on the extensive technical expertise necessary to participate in the space industry. As those technical barriers are further lowered, the ultimate capital cost for participating in space will as well. Further growing the space industry lifts all ships involved.
The software toolkit, database-leveraged analysis, and engineering / predictive performance insights that VXB brings to bear for their clients represents a meaningful step towards reducing the operating cost of building and designing spacecraft and conducting hardware engineering work. While replacing or removing engineers is not VXB’s vision of success, equipping and empowering engineering teams with the most time-efficient toolsets available is. If you are interested in accelerating your design and engineering timecycles and reducing fundamental cost of novel engineering, then be sure to reach out to VXB Aerospace!
Watch the full interview with CEO and Founder Alexander Ryan on our YouTube!
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