History

For more than 20 years, Comtech AeroAstro, Inc. has remained diligent in its conviction that small satellites and related technologies can provide significant capability for effectively achieving military, civil and commercial space mission goals.

AeroAstro was founded as a small, privately owned business in 1988 and shortly thereafter won its first spacecraft contract. The ALEXIS spacecraft was built for Los Alamos National Lab to perform X-ray astrophysics and conduct ionospheric research. Launched in 1993, it was designed for a 6-month lifetime but functioned for over 12 years, returning outstanding science data for over a decade. This was followed by the HETE and TERRIERS microsatellites. Each of these programs were proof-positive that outstanding missions could be performed using a non-traditional approach to space, and broke all the existing cost models for spacecraft development with price points in the few millions of dollars.

During the 90s and the early part of this decade, AeroAstro entered additional space product and communication markets. Realizing that achieving high utility small satellites with large payload mass fractions requires smaller spacecraft components and subsystems, AeroAstro began offering new lightweight, low power, and low cost space products, including star trackers, miniature imagers, sun sensors, and radios to the growing small satellite community. We also invented the Satellite Enabled Notification System (SENS) to aid commercial, military and government customers in mobile asset tracking, Blue and Gray Force tracking, pipeline and tank monitoring, distributed sensor field data transmission and emergency locators for recreational use.

AeroAstro was also an award-winning participant in the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program, with awards from customers including the Air Force Research Laboratory, Missile Defense Agency, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and NASA. These programs fueled technology efforts in key areas such as RF sensing payloads, innovative bus structure and encapsulation designs, new propulsion approaches, and plug-and-play technologies. In 2000, AeroAstro received the National Tibbetts Award from the Small Business Administration highlighting the company’s outstanding SBIR contributions, and holds a variety of patents associated with microspace and communication technologies.

In 2001, AeroAstro entered the Department of Defense Space market with the STPSat-1 space vehicle and the STPSat-2 spacecraft bus for the DoD Space Test Program. These satellites are designed to capitalize on excess mass and volume margin as secondary missions on Atlas V and Delta IV Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELVs), instead of requiring their own expensive launch vehicle.

In 2006, AeroAstro acquired Signal Research Corporation enabling capabilities in payload and sensor development that support national security needs in ISR, space situational awareness and special communications. In 2007, AeroAstro was acquired by Radyne Corporation which itself was acquired by Comtech Telecommunications Corp. in 2008. Today, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comtech Telecommunications Corp., Comtech AeroAstro continues to develop and pursue programs that demonstrate the expanding capabilities and utility of small satellites to support new and existing missions.