HawkEye 360 opens manufacturing facility for RF-sensing satellites
HawkEye 360 has announced the grand opening of its Advanced Technology and Development Center in Herndon, Virginia, which aims to centralize all RF-sensing satellite activities under one roof. The 19,000 square-foot data processing, software development, and manufacturing facility for satellites continues HawkEye 360’s investment in Fairfax County to support U.S. government and allied government needs.
The facility enables HawkEye 360 to have end-to-end responsibility to manufacture its commercial RF-sensing satellites for gathering geospatial intelligence. Full control of the development chain from space to ground will streamline integration, accelerate the introduction of new capabilities, and provide stronger security to satisfy the rigorous requirements for serving defense and intelligence customers.
“Our new Advanced Technology and Development Center provides our growing team a dedicated facility in which they can thrive, centralizing all our data engineering and satellite manufacturing in-house,” said HawkEye 360 CEO John Serafini. “This gives us more flexibility to adapt and innovate our commercial RF GEOINT technology. Our customers will benefit through our discoveries, as we place more sophisticated RF-sensing satellites into orbit and build algorithms that extract value from this important data.”
HawkEye 360’s new facility will house up to 70 employees and host constellation operations, data processing, software development, payload development, and satellite assembly. The company has built a customized clean room and electronics lab for advanced RF technology and smallsat manufacturing. This investment boosts HawkEye 360’s commitment to the Commonwealth of Virginia as it continues to seek and hire advanced manufacturing, space systems, data engineering, RF engineering, software engineering, and electronics engineering employees.
HawkEye 360 anticipates launching a sixth cluster of three satellites before the end of the year, which will bring its total constellation to 18 satellites to support timely defense, humanitarian, environmental, and commercial applications.
The image above shows HawkEye 360’s cleanroom at their new satellite manufacturing facility in Herndon, Virginia.