Satellite Manufacturing: From Telstar to ABB Robots

Satellite manufacturing used to mean a small team spending years on one spacecraft. Now companies talk about factories that finish a satellite a day. This post follows that change from Telstar, built by Bell Labs in 1962, through Motorola's Iridium line and the OneWeb factory in Florida, to the plants opened or announced this autumn, including Planet's new site in Berlin. It looks at where robots already work on these lines and how ABB robots such as the cleanroom IRB 1300 could fit in. It also covers what is still slowing the industry down, from short supplies of parts to a shortage of trained people.

Technicians work on a batch of Spire Lemur satellites in the company's Glasgow cleanroom, 2017. Photo: Quentin Gollier / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How satellites went from hand-built to assembly lines

The first satellites were built by hand, one at a time. Telstar 1, made by Bell Labs and launched from Cape Canaveral on 10 July 1962, was a roughly round craft about 88 centimetres across that weighed around 77 kilograms, with 3,600 solar cells on its skin. On 23 July it relayed the first live television pictures between the United States and Europe. It worked for about seven months before radiation from the Starfish Prime nuclear test damaged it, and its transmitter failed for good in February 1963. For decades after that, most satellites were one-off machines, assembled and tested by small teams in cleanrooms.

A Telstar satellite on display at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Photo: Rama / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 FR)

Motorola built the first real satellite assembly line in the 1990s. For the Iridium phone network it made satellites mainly at its Satellite Communications Group in Chandler, Arizona, on a Lockheed Martin bus. The design was meant to be assembled and tested in five days, and Motorola brought in the engineer who had set up Apple's automated Macintosh factory. At its peak in 1997 and 1998 the line finished a new satellite every 4.3 days, with a lead time of 21 days for each one. Motorola built 98 Iridium satellites in total, and 95 of them were launched between 1997 and 2002.

An Iridium satellite hanging in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Photo: Cliff / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

OneWeb Satellites, a joint venture between OneWeb and Airbus, pushed the rate higher. Its factory in Exploration Park, just outside the gates of Kennedy Space Center in Florida, opened in July 2019 and reached its target of two satellites a day by January 2020. Work was split into cells for propulsion, avionics, the communications payload and the solar module. Automated guided vehicles carried modules from cell to cell along red tape lines on the floor, while about 240 technicians and engineers did the hands-on assembly of the 150 kilogram satellites. SpaceX builds its Starlink satellites in Redmond, Washington, and has said little in public about how that line works.

An early model of a OneWeb satellite, shown in March 2017 at Exploration Park, Florida, where the factory was to be built. Photo: NASA/Kim Shiflett via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

New satellite factories in Berlin, Rome and Montreal

This autumn brought a run of new plants. On 22 September 2026 Planet opened a satellite factory in Berlin's Mitte district, with Germany's economy minister Katherina Reiche at the opening. Planet says it has built and launched 688 satellites in 15 years. The Berlin site will build Pelican satellites, a 300 kg class design with imagery of about 30 cm resolution, starting this autumn. The first one is due before the end of the year, and the plant can scale up to 60 satellites a year. Planet already has about 150 staff in Berlin and plans 70 more hires, and its first German-built Pelican is set to launch on an Isar Aerospace rocket in early 2027.

The first pair of Planet's Dove satellites leaves the International Space Station in February 2014. Photo: NASA / Expedition 38 crew via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Larger manufacturers gave even higher figures at World Space Business Week in Paris, held from 14 to 17 September. Thales Alenia Space opened its Space Smart Factory in Rome in October 2025, with robotic and cobotic automation and digital twins. In Paris the company gave a target of 100 satellites a year, from 300 kilograms up to 6 or 7 tonnes, and its chief executive Hervé Derrey spoke of going "up to one satellite per day". MDA Space chief executive Mike Greenley talked of up to two satellites a day on its Montreal line. Suppliers sounded less relaxed. Dcubed's Markus Geiss said buyers of triple-junction solar cells can "pay a fortune for it or wait 18 plus months for shipment".

Technicians in cleanroom suits inspect NOAA's GOES-T weather satellite after unpacking it in Florida, 2021. Photo: NOAA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

We found no public report of ABB robots on a satellite line, so the ideas here are possibilities. Much of the work in these plants resembles work in electronics and solar factories, where ABB robots already run. The IRB 1300 comes in an ISO 4 cleanroom version with a sealed design and a particle filter, and the smaller IRB 1100 also has an ISO 4 cleanroom version with a 4 kg payload. Arms like these could place components, load panels into fixtures or carry parts between test stations. A YuMi IRB 14000 or a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could hand parts to technicians at a bench, and a larger IRB 6700 could lift and turn heavy structure panels.

An ABB IRB 1300 in its cleanroom version, built for contamination free work. Photo: ABB

What comes next for satellite manufacturing

Solar arrays look like an obvious place for more automation. A satellite gets its power from rows of solar cells bonded to panels, and the comments in Paris show that cell supply is already a bottleneck. On the ground, solar module lines have used robots for years, and ABB lists models from the IRB 360 FlexPicker to the IRB 7600 for solar cell and module production. Our post on robots and solar panels covers that side. Space arrays are made in much smaller numbers and to stricter rules, but a plant that builds 60 or 100 satellites a year still has many identical panels to lay up, inspect and test.

An ABB robot on Absolicon's solar collector line in Sweden. Photo: ABB

Testing is the other big job. Every satellite has to survive vibration, vacuum and hot and cold cycles before it flies, and moving hardware in and out of test rigs takes time and careful handling. Robots could move units between stations or plug in test cables while people check the results. Thales Alenia Space built its Rome plant around digital twins, and ABB's tools work the same way: robot cells are usually designed, simulated and checked in RobotStudio before anyone builds them. That habit pays off in a cleanroom, where moving equipment around after the fact is slow and expensive.

Engineers deploy and test one of the 14.2 metre solar arrays of NASA's Europa Clipper in a Kennedy Space Center cleanroom, August 2024. Photo: NASA/Frank Michaux via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Supply is the first open problem. Component makers in Paris described running at or near full capacity, and no robot can speed up a solar cell that has not been delivered. Designs also keep changing, which makes fixed, single-purpose machines a risky buy, so robots that can be reprogrammed for the next model fit better. People are the other limit, because technicians who can handle flight hardware and also look after robot cells will be hard to find. For people at home the effect is easier to see. More satellites mean wider coverage for satellite internet, and on 15 September SES and Elveo Mobile announced plans to build satellites in Europe that connect directly to ordinary phones.

An engineer uses an AR headset to check a GoFa cobot cell before it is built. Photo: ABB

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