Jason Kim stands in an empty room at Boeing Co.’s satellite factory in El Segundo.
But for Kim, chief executive of Millennium Space Systems, a subsidiary of the Chicago-based aerospace and defense contractor, he sees what that room will look like by the end of the year when it is fully operational as Millennium’s small satellite factory.
“Everything about this is about flexibility,” Kim said.

The small satellite factory within a larger Boeing plant takes up about 30,000 square feet.
“The factory will be fully operational in the fourth quarter of this year,” Kim said, “meaning all the tooling, all the people, all the processes are in place.”

The factory will do the final assembly on satellites that are prototyped at the main Millennium building a few blocks away from the Boeing facility. It is across the street from the Los Angeles Air Force Base and kitty corner to Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit that operates a federally funded research and development center. The base is where the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center is located. Both the Space Force and Aerospace Corp. are customers of Millennium, according to Kim.

The satellites made in the new factory are for both government and commercial customers using an integrated payload array, which is a smaller version of the configuration on larger satellites. It allows Millennium to make satellites used in be it earth observation, missile warning or science missions.
“It is a highly flexible, powerful communications platform that can fit on a very small spacecraft that you really couldn’t do before,” said Ryan Reid, president, Boeing Commercial Satellite Systems International.

Millennium was founded shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Kim was a principal of the company then, when it had only about 20 or so employees. Today it employs more than 500 workers. It was acquired by Boeing in 2018.
Millennium launched its first satellite in 2011 for a national security space customer.

“We delivered small sats for national security space (customers) in LEO (low earth orbit), in GEO (geostationary earth orbit) and now we are on contract for an MEO (medium earth orbit) system for the Space Force,” Kim said.
Reid said that the growth path as the company sees it for fully networked, integrated multi-orbit systems.

“Our digital technology married with Millennium’s expertise can help us to address that future,” Reid added.
There is no barbed wire or moat around the small sat factory, Reid said, and it has room to grow.

The scalability of the new factory was done intentionally to meet customer demands be it earth observation, missile warning or science missions.
“Since we are scalable, since we are flexible, we can accommodate each of those missions,” Kim said. “We are still going to prototype; we are still going to do digital design so you can try before you buy. But now we have this scaled up capacity to perform those different missions.”