2023 Year in Review
By Chris Pearson, CEO
Greetings.
As 2023 comes to an end, I wanted to take a breath and reflect on the past year. By every measure, this year brought significant growth, learnings, and successes and I couldn’t be more grateful to our staff, customers and investors.
While 2023 wraps up my first year at Agile Space, it also marked the beginning of our efforts to significantly scale the business – and has quickly become one of our most pivotal years. While we have long prided ourselves in our ability to produce cutting-edge, high-performance propulsion solutions to meet our customers’ needs, we’re now making the transition to high-production capability. This also means the team has navigated new org structures and leadership, new customer requirements, and new markets. How we successfully managed those transitions is something I’ll never take for granted. Through all of this, we’ve stayed humble, nimble, and fully committed to our vision and to our customers.
The team has worked tirelessly to develop and deliver unique propulsion solutions for our customers’ specific mission requirements. We’ve enhanced our thrusters and optimized our manufacturing and testing processes to make them faster, more efficient and even more cost effective. We’ve even started to develop tanks in response to our customers’ needs (more on that soon). We’re focused not only on enabling their mission success in the near term, but also on extending our value – not just as a supplier, but a partner to align our technology and product development investments to accelerate the next generation of space capabilities for the wider industry.
Additionally this year, we have played a growing role in developing effective solutions for national security missions and are confident in our ability to meet those unique parameters. Above all, we are proud to be Agile, and to offer responsive solutions that meet the evolving needs of civil, commercial, and national security space sectors.
Reflecting on it all, we’ve made strides across the board – with significant investments and advancements in our facilities, processes, brand, and people. I couldn’t be more excited and bullish about future opportunities.
2023 MILESTONE RECAP:
While there are too many “wow, that’s huge” wins to name, here are a few of our most significant accomplishments this past year which have contributed to our scalability and efficiency efforts:
Achieved successful qualification testing of the Agile A110 bipropellant thruster, to qualify to support commercial lunar missions and the return of humans to the moon under NASA’s Artemis program. More importantly, following this milestone, Agile delivered the first A110 flight units to customer Astrobotic for the Griffin Lunar Lander / NASA VIPER mission.
Achieved further customer and application diversification beyond our initial lunar lander missions with a Space Domain Awareness satellite propulsion system, a GEO to cis-lunar orbital transfer vehicle main engine, and launch vehicle propulsion components.
Closed a $13M seed round from Lockheed Martin Ventures, Caruso Ventures and the Greater Colorado Venture Fund (among others), demonstrating support for our vision of bringing a new generation of in-space chemical propulsion products and technologies to the space industry. Thank you for your trust and support.
Designed, developed, manufactured, and tested the experimental AX19 preburner, the largest ever in-space bi-prop hydrazine engine, for Sierra Space – and went from contract signing to delivery in 19 weeks, our fastest turn yet!
Designed and produced an engine weighing just 4.86 kg which can produce 500-lbf of thrust due to groundbreaking additive manufacturing processes. A first of its kind.
Accomplished a 90 percent reduction in material costs for specialty alloys used in aerospace applications - let that sink in!
Selected as one of 32 Colorado companies to win a 2023 Growing Advanced Industries in Colorado Grant in the Early-Stage Capital and Retention category.
What’s the most important theme behind all these milestones? Clearly, it’s the team. While everyone says people are your biggest asset, it’s never been more true and evident with this group at Agile Space. It’s because of them, supported by our phenomenal investors and customers, that we close out this year appreciative, and inspired for the year ahead.
Happy holidays to you and your families. After a break , we’ll see you in the new year. We’re fired up (pun definitely intended!) and ready to go.
- Chris Pearson, CEO
BUSINESS MILESTONES:
This year we have achieved true market traction with almost 50% higher revenue compared to 2022 and a 75% increase in orders. Agile was able to sign a total of 22 contracts, including tank and propulsion system sales (including our newly developed Ticonderoga propulsion system).
BY THE NUMBERS:
TEST OPERATIONS MILESTONES:
In early 2023, we announced the construction and commissioning of a new hot fire test stand, Animas I, which expands our in-house testing capabilities. These test stands, in collaboration with our experienced design and additive manufacturing teams, have resulted in a fully integrated offering. Having control over these three main pillars allows us to design, print, machine, and hot fire test an engine design in a matter of weeks.
While it’s an industry standard to deliver performance data from hot firing pulse-mode thrusters, most providers average performance over all the pulses or to down-sample the data to 100 Hz. Agile however provides customer required data for EACH pulse with a minimum sample rate of 1,000 Hz. It’s the baseline standard we use in our data packages and our customers tell us this high-fidelity and precise data is a game-changer in planning their missions.
HOT FIRES TESTING BY THE NUMBERS:
ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING MILESTONES:
As 3D printing is a cornerstone in our manufacturing process, this year we added the capability to print Ti6242 on the TP5k to support not only our aerospace customers’ needs, but we’re now able to create innovative solutions for other industries.
Following are a few highlights:
Designed and validated TruPrint 1000 oversupply baffle to reduce in-process soot build up on the laser window. This allows us to extend laser window life at almost no cost.
Added pneumatic vibration depowdering to reduce material loss across all machines and material processes.
Developed proprietary laser parameters for fine CoCr and Inconel 625 for the TruPrint 1000 and TruPrint 5000 respectively.
Released 3 Qualified Material Processes enabling additive manufacturing of flight hardware for CoCr, Nb C103, and Inconel 718.
ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING PRODUCTION BY THE NUMBERS:
TEAM AGILE SPACE MILESTONES:
Our people make all the difference. We strive everyday to foster a creative and empowering environment for everyone, appreciating every day what our team brings to the table. It’s not just lip service either. We know that given the opportunity to thrive and grow, everyone does their best work – we’ve seen the magic happen.
In addition to supporting each other, Team Agile has also made a concentrated effort to give back, extending our reach to support our local community, schools, college, families, and minorities. Besides, we love what we do – what’s more fun than making rocket engines?
TEAM AGILE SPACE BY THE NUMBERS:
Our plans for 2024 are beyond exciting and we’re looking forward to even more growth and advancements in the year ahead. We’re thrilled by the level of interest across the industry – by commercial, military and government entities (and especially for national security applications). The demand for efficient, innovative propulsion solutions to support the exponential growth in space missions is only increasing, and we’re excited to be the propulsion solution choice for so many upcoming missions. Stay tuned for more exciting news as we head into the new year!
