Maxar Technologies

Recognized under Tier 8 — Robotics, Maxar Technologies is a Colorado-based satellite manufacturer with a robotics program rooted in in-orbit assembly and servicing. Under a $142 million NASA contract, Maxar built the Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER), a five-meter robotic arm intended to demonstrate autonomous assembly of a communications antenna and manufacture of a structural beam in orbit as part of the OSAM-1 mission. Maxar delivered the mission's spacecraft bus in September 2023, but NASA canceled OSAM-1 in March 2024 after cost growth pushed the program past its $2.05 billion budget and repeated schedule slips. The SPIDER hardware and the in-orbit assembly techniques it was built to demonstrate remain directly applicable to the orbital depots, staging platforms, and modular infrastructure that a Mars transportation architecture will need to assemble and service in space rather than launch fully built from Earth.