SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – Edge Aerospace is scaling its manufacturing in the U.S. through a licensing agreement with Redwire under which Redwire will manufacture Edge’s data processing units (DPUs) and network switches in the U.S.
The companies announced the agreement during a signing ceremony at Small Satellite Conference in Utah on Tuesday.
Edge Aerospace CEO JJ Jaworski tells Via Satellite that while the company is based in Luxembourg, the majority of its customers are based in the U.S. This licensing agreement will help the company in the U.S. market. Edge will still manufacture for other markets in Europe.
“Since Edge Aerospace is two years old, bumping up towards such a large production is a challenge,” Jaworski says. “We [have] collaborated with Redwire since almost the beginning of the company. Considering that Redwire is capable of manufacturing hundreds of units per year, this is a great collaboration to increase this distribution in the U.S.”
Redwire will also integrate the processors into some of its own products, and Redwire’s customers will have access to the processors as well.
The agreement will help ease supply chain constraints for access to processors, said Don Wesson, senior vice president of Redwire Defense Tech.
“Anyone that tries to buy processing at this point notices that there’s an 18-month to two-year lead time. Now I can control our supply chain, and we can get our deliveries much faster,” Wesson said.
Redwire will manufacture the processors at its facility in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Wesson said. He expects deliveries as early as the first quarter of next year.
Much of the demand for Edge processors in the U.S. is from space domain awareness (SDA) companies that want to process the large volumes of data collected onboard the spacecraft, Jaworski said.
“Satellite integrators are building the next generation of satellites that are much more oriented toward data processing and networking due to the [amount] of data they are planning to collect,” he said. “The U.S. market is growing surprisingly fast. I have never seen such a demand for the systems we are building right now. This is where Redwire will be essential to help us scale it up.”
