Build vs. Buy: How Flarewing™ solves this dilemma
In the space industry when considering this question many people look at SpaceX as an example and try to mimic versus understanding when to build.
When our CTO, Pele Collins, worked at SpaceX, he was the responsible engineer for the Dragon parachutes. These parachutes were going to be responsible for safely bringing back the the first astronaut splashdown since the Apollo missions. Like all SpaceX missions, they had to work fast and get it right. When Pele describes the trades, SpaceX knew it was best to go with expert partners - companies who specialized in making aerospace parachutes. Because parachutes are chaotic, poorly understood and analysed, hard to manufacture, labor-intensive, specialized systems. If the company most famous for vertical integration drew a line here, it is worth understanding.
Deployable space structures sit on the same side of that line.
One of our team's greatest inspirations, the James Webb Telescope, was an incredible feat of engineering and worked perfectly despite the potential for hundreds of single-point failures. However, it was delayed by decades and ran billions over budget because of the challenges of understanding these complex mechanisms. Deployables are chaotic, poorly understood and analyzed, specialized systems, and most Space companies have avoided deployables for this reason, but they cannot anymore.
Deployable solar arrays for satellites are essential for the growing power demand, but they are a DEBT that will slow you and your team down and cost more across everything from ground-testing equipment and headcount to simulation capabilities and more. Fundamentally, every engineer on array deployment is an engineer not working on your differentiating technology and instead is working on just providing the power plug for it.
Our CEO's PhD research was devoted to this problem, and today more than a dozen engineers work on it full-time at Beyond Reach Labs, designing, optimizing, and simulating large deployable space systems, so that your team can focus on the areas that matter most to your customers.
Beyond Reach Labs Flarewing™ is putting your teams ahead of schedule, making your satellites more capable, and your missions more reliable. The Flarewing-S will be flight-qualified by the end of 2026, with the Flarewing-M and Flarewing-L following in 2027.
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