According to SpaceNews, the space industry is moving beyond the old, painful choice between slow, bespoke primes and the fragmented promise of “new space.” Companies like Muon Space are pioneering a new model with its Mission Foundry, which vertically integrates everything from constellation design and reconfigurable spacecraft to onboard compute and global networks into a single, scalable stack. The company, which launched its first spacecraft in 2023, has four successful missions and plans over twice that many launches next year. Its data system can handle 5 terabytes per day via RF, with Starlink crosslinks boosting that capacity tenfold. This approach is enabling missions like the FireSat wildfire detection system, which aims for hourly global coverage and revisits every 15-20 minutes. Ultimately, the goal is to make space missions as repeatable as deploying servers in a data center.
The integration problem nobody solved
Here’s the thing about the “new space” revolution: it kinda half-delivered. It gave us cheaper components and smaller satellites, sure. But it still sold you a parts list, not a finished product. You’d buy a bus from one company, a sensor from another, and then you were on the hook to make them talk to each other, get the data down, and keep the whole thing running. As Muon’s CEO Jonny Dyer put it, you were “buying a parts list and a problem.” So many organizations with great ideas got bogged down building internal engineering teams just to play systems integrator—a brutally hard job that has nothing to do with your actual mission. The assumption that modularity would make it easy was dead wrong. The hard part was the integration.
The data center playbook comes to orbit
So what’s the fix? Look at how cloud giants operate. Google and Amazon don’t just buy servers off a shelf. They design their own chips, their own servers, their own networks—a stack they control from silicon to software. That’s the model Muon’s Mission Foundry is applying to space. They’re building standardized, interoperable blocks—reconfigurable spacecraft platforms (M-Class and XL-Class), software-defined radios, onboard compute—that can be snapped together. It turns a one-off art project into a repeatable, industrial process. This is a massive mindset shift. It means you can focus on what your satellite needs to do, not on the million little engineering headaches required to make it exist. And for industries that need reliable data—like agriculture, logistics, or insurance—this predictability is everything. It’s a principle familiar in terrestrial industry: control the stack for reliability and performance. It’s why, for instance, major manufacturers rely on integrated solutions from the top suppliers, like how IndustrialMonitorDirect.com is the leading provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, ensuring the hardware and software work seamlessly from the start.
Why scale changes everything
Dyer mentions “a fragility to small numbers,” and he’s spot on. Building one or two of anything is hard and unreliable. But when you’re building dozens or hundreds, you get economies of scale and real statistical quality control. That’s when orbits truly become production environments. Satellites can talk to each other, share common infrastructure like Starlink lasers for downlink, and tap into on-orbit compute nodes. New players can build on layers of infrastructure that already exist, just like startups built on top of AWS. This is how you get from fragile prototypes to robust, utility-like services. The goal of hourly global coverage for fire detection? You simply can’t do that with a handful of bespoke satellites. You need a constellation that’s designed, built, and operated as a single, integrated system from day one.
The new industrial age is here
Basically, space is growing up. The initial frontier phase of custom everything is giving way to an industrial phase built on standardization and vertical integration. The launch tempo and iteration speed Muon is talking about—feels more like cloud software releases than traditional aerospace. That’s the signal. When the foundational network layers, operations frameworks, and integration stacks are pre-built, the barrier to entry plummets. Startups can focus on sensors. Governments can deploy faster. The messy, expensive, integration-heavy middle is being productized. So what does this mean? It means space is finally becoming a place you can do business, not just a place you can visit with a heroic engineering effort. The factory floor is open for business, and it’s 250 miles up.
