Tendeg announced the delivery of the first flight antenna manufactured at Innovation Drive, the company's new 120,000-square-foot production facility built to support scaled production of deployable space antennas. The milestone marks an important step in Tendeg's evolution from highly customized, mission-specific builds toward a manufacturing model designed to support higher-volume national security and commercial space programs.
Innovation Drive brings engineering, precision manufacturing, integration, and environmental testing together under one roof. The facility was designed around repeatability and throughput, with standardized tooling, modular subassemblies, and vertically integrated capabilities including mesh knitting, cord braiding, and environmental testing. That structure gives Tendeg greater control over quality, schedule and production readiness as demand grows for deployable apertures across proliferated space architectures.
"Over the past decade, we have proven these systems on orbit," said Gregg Freebury, CEO of Tendeg. "Innovation Drive is the next step in that progression. It allows us to deliver proven deployable antenna technology with the manufacturing discipline, scale, and consistency that the market increasingly demands."
As space missions move toward more distributed and proliferated architectures, manufacturers are under increasing pressure to deliver hardware at greater cadence without compromising reliability. For deployable antennas, that means not only flight-proven performance, but also the ability to produce at scale with schedule confidence and domestic supply chain resilience.
Innovation Drive is built to meet that need. At full capacity, the facility is designed to support production of more than 100 deployable apertures annually. Antennas manufactured at Innovation Drive support a range of customer missions, including large-aperture reflectors for Capella Space, Astranis and programs supporting NASA and the U.S. Department of War. With more than two dozen antennas successfully deployed on orbit, Tendeg is pairing flight heritage with expanded production capacity to support the next generation of space sensing and communications systems.
Click here to learn more about Communication Systems on SATNow
