Apex Space's Ian Cinnamon on satellite platforms, Golden Dome, and why the US needs to move faster in orbit

Summary

Apex Space, founded in September 2022, builds satellite buses—the power, avionics, and control systems that let payloads function in orbit. The company is roughly two and a half years old. Its first satellite, Ares SN1, launched on a Falcon 9 from the Air Force Western Test Range and has been operational for over a year. Ian Cinnamon, Apex's co-founder and CEO, treats this as meaningful because staying functional after a year in orbit is genuinely uncommon in the industry.

Cinnamon's background is software, not aerospace. He built an AI computer vision company and sold it to Palantir before starting Apex. Co-founder Max Benassi came from SpaceX, where he worked on production scaling. Cinnamon argues that this combination—an outsider's perspective paired with deep technical experience—is the formula that works in new space, and he points to Varda as a parallel case.

Customer mix

Apex's current customers span a wide range. A hyperspectral imaging customer uses the platform to identify specific crops from orbit with enough resolution to distinguish potato fields by age. Aetherflux, founded by Baiju Bhatt of Robinhood, uses the Apex bus to collect solar power in space and beam it down to Earth. Anduril is also a named customer, with an ongoing and expanding relationship. Additional defense customers are under NDA.

The mission Cinnamon is most focused on is space-based protection against hypersonic glide vehicles and ballistic missiles. He references the Golden Dome executive order directly—the White House directive calling for space-based defense capabilities—as the clearest public articulation of what Apex is building toward.

Orbit landscape

Ares SN1 operates at roughly 450–500 km in low Earth orbit. Very low Earth orbit offers higher-resolution imagery but faster orbital decay. LEO is where commercial proliferation has concentrated over the past decade. Medium Earth orbit, where GPS satellites fly, offers more protection from ground-based threats and lower communication latency than geostationary orbit. Geostationary orbit keeps satellites fixed over one point on Earth and is where traditional large satellites operate. Beyond that sits cislunar space, where companies like AstroForge are running asteroid mining missions.

Tariff exposure

Apex sources most of its components domestically and sees minimal direct tariff impact. The risk runs the other way. Reciprocal tariffs from allied nations could affect Apex's international satellite sales. Aerospace and defense goods are largely exempt from the current tariff structure because cross-ally transfers of defense technology are treated as a strategic priority rather than a trade flow to restrict.

Pace

Apex went from blank-sheet design to a working satellite in orbit in under a year. Cinnamon's view is that this is still too slow. His benchmark isn't five years versus one—it's whether the industry can eventually compress that timeline to weeks or days. The current pace is not a success story but a floor to build from.