York Space Systems, Inc.

York Space Systems makes satellites the way a car company makes cars, in series, off a line, from a small number of shared designs. That approach found its market when the Space Development Agency decided to buy hundreds of small spacecraft instead of a handful of large ones. Founded in 2012 and based in Greenwood Village, Colorado, the company took majority investment from AE Industrial Partners in 2022 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in January 2026 under the ticker YSS, raising 629 million dollars. Around 710 people work there, and the Denver factory is rated at roughly a thousand spacecraft a year.

Three platforms carry everything. S-CLASS is the original three axis stabilised bus, taking 85 kilograms of payload and 500 watts of power in an ESPA compatible envelope. LX-CLASS scales that to 300 kilograms and 1.5 kilowatts, and it is the bus underneath York's Space Development Agency transport satellites. M-CLASS is the largest, built for payloads above a tonne with more than eight kilowatts of power while sharing about three quarters of its technology with the smaller two. Around the platforms sits an ecosystem the company sells as one piece. Components including magnetometers, GPS receivers, sun sensors, patch antennas and power control units. Optical and radio frequency crosslinks for meshed constellations. Deployment across dedicated, rideshare and constellation launch options. Ground services reaching more than a hundred stations across laser, X, S and K bands. Mission control through the Bastion ground software and a multi-mission operations centre, with internal APIs handling tasking and data delivery.

Government programmes dominate the order book. York delivered spacecraft for the Space Development Agency Tranche 0 demonstration, won a Tranche 1 Transport Layer contract in 2022 that has since put more than forty satellites through the factory, and was selected for ten Tranche 2 Transport Layer Gamma vehicles. Its Dragoon mission launched in June 2025 as the first of a twelve satellite prototype constellation for missile warning, missile tracking and secure connectivity to warfighter platforms, and it later demonstrated two way ultra high frequency communication from low orbit. The Space Force has separately selected York to supply small satellites across a range of national security missions.

Since going public the company has been buying its own supply chain. It took ATLAS Space Operations in August 2025 for ground stations and space to ground services, Orbion Space Technology in March 2026 for electric propulsion, ALL.SPACE in April 2026 for multi-network satellite terminals in a deal worth about 300 million dollars, and Solestial in May 2026 for space solar cells. The pattern is deliberate. Each purchase pulls a part York previously bought inside the company, and the terminal business pushes it toward recurring revenue from operating spacecraft rather than only selling them.