Blue Canyon Technologies won a $14.6 million contract to produce a small inspector satellite.

Blue Canyon has to deliver a small satellite bus that can operate and maneuver for up to three years in orbits beyond GEO WASHINGTON — Blue Canyon Technologies won a $14.6 million contract to produce a small inspector satellite for operations beyond geosynchronous Earth orbit. According to a Nov. 22 announcement, Blue Canyon was selected by the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a satellite under AFRL’s Space Situational Awareness Micro-Satellite Bus program. The company has to deliver by February 2023 a small satellite bus that can operate and maneuver for up to three years in orbits beyond GEO and can support a broad range of payloads. Blue Canyon, based in Lafayette, Colorado, is a small satellite manufacturer. In December 2020 it was acquired by Raytheon Technologies. The Space Situational Awareness Micro-Satellite Bus was a competitive award under a U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research program. The goal is to produce a small space situational awareness satellite system with significant orbital maneuverability so it can move across orbits.

Future spacecraft could use a single propellant to perform both rapid movements and slow, highly controlled adjustments.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes fell on Tuesday as a rebound in technology shares faded.

Alphabet entered a cloud service agreement with SpaceX to pay $920 million per month for 200 megawatts of capacity from October 2026 through June 2029.