MDA: Manufacturing Now Underway at New High-Volume Satellite Facility
Press Release + Noah Note
Just a year ago, our new 185,000 square-foot high-volume satellite manufacturing expansion in Montréal was a steel beam structure spanning more than three football fields. The envelope would be finished at the end of March and it would only take eight months to move in the first equipment. Clean rooms recently became operational and now flight model production has begun in this next-generation facility that doubles our floor space.
“People are impressed by the sheer size of the building,” says Vice-President of Operations Sylvain Riendeau. “But what’s most important is that every aspect of operations was carefully thought out and accounted for in the overall design to enable us to deliver up to two satellites per day.”
The Latest Tech
Electronics assembly, integration and testing take place on a production line specially designed in a continuous, sequential flow for optimal efficiency with highly sophisticated automated inspection and test equipment that ensures printed circuit boards (PCB) are free of defects. Thanks to the new, state-of-the art machinery added, it now takes a quarter of the time it once took to assemble and inspect a PCB. When we eventually attain peak production capacity, the output will reach hundreds of finished cards per day.
In the area where active antennas are assembled, technicians will soon be assisted at their stations by augmented reality systems that project instructions onto their work bench to guide them along each step. A linear robot will also help with repetitive tasks, meaning human and robots will work side by side, each performing the steps they can do best.
To test antennas before they are encased in the platform, MDA Space developed a proprietary test chamber, the quasi-far field range (QFF), a marvel of engineering innovation. Three QFF units stand alongside a row of thermal chambers designed to accommodate the various MDA AURORA (TM) satellite models.
Finally, all units produced internally or received from suppliers will be integrated into the satellite at a series of stations equipped with augmented reality and automated equipment, on a defined schedule that matches production to demand. And it will be possible to integrate different MDA AURORA (TM) products at the same time without interruption.
Purposeful Logistics
In any manufacturing facility, space is a premium commodity, and with high-volume production comes a high volume of hardware. Towering from the third-floor store to the ground floor, a pair of automated vertical storage units (VLM) with their 75 shelves in a carousel system are a novel solution to a warehousing puzzle. They offer a substantial advantage: a combined 1,126 cubic feet of storage.
These units and the rest of the state-of-the-art technology that has been introduced in the facility are key to unlocking our ability to manufacture a large number of low Earth orbit constellation satellites in a short period of time, but the establishment of new manufacturing processes and performance data collection mechanisms to attain the utmost level of efficiency and agility has been just as important. We have meticulously considered how people and products flow through the space to save time, and defined metrics to scale production to maximum capacity. In essence, our engineering and production teams have had to think and do differently.
“I can’t overstate how deeply transformative this project is and how rapidly we’ve advanced,” says Satellite Systems Vice-President Luigi Pozzebon. “We’ve now entered a new era in our history, becoming a satellite prime that can deliver the latest products thanks to an ingenious team and a premier manufacturing facility.”
Noah Note: A huge congrats to MDA Space for achieving this. The addition of their new facility will allow MDA to begin continuous manufacturing of their Aurora Satellite buses, a massive capacity increase for Canada’s space economy who until now have struggled to maintain large bus manufacturing continuously.
The Aurora bus is really cool. It's a fully integrated, software-defined satellite platform optimized for high-throughput, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) constellations. It features a regenerative On-Board Processor (OBP) that features a built-in software-defined packet router, enabling dynamic, in-orbit reconfiguration of coverage, frequency, and bandwidth allocation.
The platform leverages industry-first Ka-band Direct Radiating Arrays (DRA) with direct RF sampling, eliminating the need for intermediate frequency conversion and significantly reducing mass and power consumption while maximizing spectral efficiency.
Aurora is designed from the start to be scalable, modular, and quick to produce. This new facility will allow MDA to produce up to two buses a day, a modest but significantly milestone for the company. I am proud to see them acomplish this.