A Virginia startup building a backup to GPS has locked in the hardware for its first production run.
TrustPoint will take 40 satellites from EnduroSat’s U.S. arm, its largest disclosed production commitment. The company said Sept. 10 that the spacecraft arrive in three batches, a staged delivery meant to let lessons from early builds feed into later ones. Financial terms and a delivery calendar were not released.
TrustPoint has flown three demonstration satellites carrying a C-band navigation payload and is building four more under a Space Force-backed effort with Indiana-based NearSpace Launch. The new order marks a jump in scale toward a constellation the company has said could reach roughly 300 spacecraft.
Its pitch is resilience. GPS broadcasts in L-band, while TrustPoint plans to send navigation signals in C-band, spectrum more familiar to satellite communications and terrestrial wireless. The goal is a commercial positioning, navigation and timing service that complements or backs up government systems adversaries try to jam and spoof.
Chief executive Patrick Shannon said the company will keep control of payloads, signals, ground systems and service while buying buses from outside suppliers. TrustPoint says its payload is bus agnostic by design, with two manufacturers signed and two more qualified. Shannon argued that resilient PNT cannot rest on a single point of failure, whether in orbit or in the supply chain.
EnduroSat, founded in 2015 in Bulgaria, says it has deployed more than 100 satellites and has been expanding capacity for larger constellations.
