Check out Valley of Depth #045 on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Ian Cinnamon didn’t set out to build a satellite company. After selling his first startup to Palantir, he became convinced the real bottleneck in space wasn’t launch or payloads, but the spacecraft itself. While rockets were getting cheaper and payloads more capable, satellite buses were still being built like bespoke engineering projects. Apex’s answer was simple in theory and incredibly difficult in practice: turn spacecraft into products.
Four years later, Apex is building standardized satellite platforms for commercial and national security customers, with a product lineup that now spans missions from LEO to GEO. We get into whether the satellite bus market is genuinely supply constrained, if standardized spacecraft become commodities or durable technology platforms, and how Starship, proliferated constellations, and rising defense demand are reshaping the economics of spacecraft manufacturing.
We also cover:
- Why Ian believes spacecraft should become products instead of bespoke engineering programs
- Whether the satellite bus market is actually underbuilt or heading toward oversupply
- How Apex thinks about manufacturing, vertical integration, and scaling production
- Why larger satellites may make more sense in a world of cheap launch
- The capital strategy behind building one of the industry’s fastest-growing companies