The most advanced systems in defense and aerospace — drones, interceptors, hypersonic vehicles, satellites, reactor cores — are built from composites. Not metal. Composites are lighter, stronger, more thermally resilient, and better suited to the performance ceiling those systems require.
But the factories that produce composites were built for a different era. Slow, manual, artisanal. A single rocket nozzle can take months. The technology exists. The factory to produce it at rate does not.
Orbital exists to close that gap.
Orbital was founded in 2015 to rebuild composite manufacturing from the ground up. For ten years, we've developed our own materials platform and production stack — multi-robot coordination, continuous-fiber printing, and the process control around both.
What that platform enabled was a decade of applied work with leading national labs and defense agencies — putting Orbital's printing stack against mission-critical problems and proving it in environments where the science has to be right. On top of that: participation in the Catalyst Campus Accelerator (USAF · Space Force) and the Seraphim Space Accelerator, programs that confirmed composite manufacturing isn't just laboratory science, but technology the space and defense communities are ready to deploy.
We've built cells, printed parts, proved out the chemistry, the physics, and the applications. That work wasn't a detour. It was the foundation.
Our team brings decades of aerospace and defense experience to the problem.
The next chapter is production.
The defining industrial problem of this decade — magazine depth for interceptors, cost parity with adversary systems, domestic manufacturing at rate — is a composite manufacturing problem. The chemistry is proven. The robotics work. What's required now is scale.
And not just scale in one place. We designed our cells modular from day one, because the future of composite manufacturing isn't one mega-factory. It's deployable production — wherever the mission demands. Autonomous factories on American soil today. Expeditionary manufacturing at forward bases. On-orbit production. The same platform, deployed where the mission lives.
We're partnering with defense primes, space companies, and program offices to deliver parts that weren't possible before, at rates that weren't possible before, in places manufacturing wasn't possible before.
The factory to produce composites at rate didn't exist.
We're building it.