Spacecraft Standardization

Modular by Design: Why Integration, Not Invention, Is Space's Next Advantage

RTX’s Blue Canyon Technologies unveiled FleXbus this week, and the product itself is less interesting than what it admits about the market. FleXbus bundles Blue Canyon’s flight-proven FleXcore guidance, navigation and control system with avionics, command and data handling, sensors, actuators, power control, batteries, payload interfaces and flight software, built to work across different spacecraft structures so customers can integrate the pieces in their own facilities, according to SpaceNews’s coverage of the launch . Blue Canyon did not build a better satellite. It built a kit of parts a customer assembles into whatever satellite they actually need, which is a different business entirely.