Great. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sheila Kahyaoglu with the Jefferies Aerospace, Defense and Airlines Equity Research team. Thank you for joining us for our fifth annual Space Summit. I can't believe it's been five years, where Greg and I have been hosting. Dirk, I think, has been a repeat offender on our calls. Dirk Wallinger, CEO of York Space Systems. Over the past year, we finally got to launch official coverage of York, which has been super exciting. A company Dirk founded in 2012. He's led York's rise from an ambitious concept to a publicly traded aerospace and defense company, which is pretty cool to see, with more than 30 satellites on orbit, a growing portfolio of national security programs, an acquisitive portfolio as well.
York is one of the largest providers of satellites to the DoD and continues to play a central role in next-gen space architecture. With that, thank you so much for being here. Maybe just stepping back a little bit for those who aren't as familiar with York, can we talk about how York has become a key player in proliferated satellite architecture, particularly in non-security missions? How do we think about York in today's space ecosystem?
Yeah. No, I appreciate it. It's great talking with you again. You're right, I've been able to participate in the past few years, so it's wonderful to see it continue to grow and have a lot of outreach to the community. I appreciate. Thanks to you, Sheila and Jefferies. Yeah. York has been doing this for a little bit. I founded the company in 2012, and at the time when I founded the company, the national architecture was really about the billion-dollar satellites kind of built over decades. There was a firm belief by me and some of the people who joined the company early on that proliferated systems was really what was going to be required for the future. We had a firm belief in that, even when it was not a popular concept, quite frankly.
We built our first mission back in 2017 timeframe. We've grown since. We now have three different platforms. That was our first platform, but we have three platforms now. The government has now embraced proliferation as being part of their infrastructure and how they're going to approach the future. They're shifting a lot of the historical paradigm of billion-dollar satellites built over decades to proliferated systems, which are a little more robust. We're executing today as a mission prime, the same as we always have. We're really not selling software or pieces to anyone else. We're executing the complete turnkey mission, and what the customer needs now is results. That's where York fits as the prime, where we're kind of disrupting the segment and providing complete solutions to our customers today.
It's been a lot of growth over the past decade and a half.
That's great. Maybe if you could just talk about the broader competitive landscape, how do we think about what capabilities York brings to the picture? Obviously, speed of delivery is one big one, vertical integration, cost efficiency. How do we step back and think about the competitors and where you have excelled?
There's kind of a little bit of a bifurcation, I guess I would say, in the market right now, where you have the amazing traditional primes out there who do deliver amazing capabilities. I worked for a lot of those companies delivering just pristine capabilities that are unmatched. They still continue to do that. What you're looking at is more of a hybrid now, where there's some new space companies similar to York, in the sense where their emphasis is going to be on speed, delivery, and price point. As an example, on a lot of the contracts that we execute on, we actually deliver the exact same capability at half the price. On some of these contracts head-to-head, we've been first every single time. A lot of the new space companies are going to be more focused on proliferation, speed, and cost.
We're luckily in a very good position in the sense that we've been doing this for a decade and a half. We're operating more satellites in orbit than pretty much any other kind of near peer in the new space segment side of things. We actually compete mostly with the primes. Our advantage there is half the cost and half the schedule, always first.
Got it. I guess, what missions are you most suited for? How do we think about York's smaller satellite platforms? What mission types does it fit the best as you think about where the primes excels versus where York excels, and how you think about just Proximity of Operations, moving target indicators, et cetera?
Yeah. The industry has kind of shifted a little bit from where it started when we flew our first platform. People do tend to think of us as a communications provider, but that's actually one mission set that we're doing out of eight. What we're doing now is we have three different platforms. The smaller platform would be the S-CLASS, which you could think about as 200 kg kind of size. Our largest platform, the M-CLASS, is actually 2,000 kg, so roughly the size of your car. You live in New York, so you might not have the car, but the car.
I don't even have a driver's license. Come on, you know me better than that.
A small SUV with 8 kW of power. What we're seeing is missions like remote proximity operations that we're doing now, we actually have two vehicles built downstairs for that mission set. Those tend to be a little bit smaller. Those are kind of inspector kind of capabilities, and so they need to be small and agile. More and more on the classified side of things, which is where most of the dollars are headed, by the way. Budgets, I saw in the latest 2027 Department of War, our estimate was about $20.9 billion in classified. It's growing. Those are getting larger and larger and more and more powerful. Those tend to be more of a fit for our M-CLASS. That's where our heritage across a multitude of platforms has really been strategically very valuable for us.
It's the reason why we've had some recent very selective IDIQ wins that we're really excited about. Much larger power for the classified mission sets. Moving target indicator is a great example where there's lots of power. Synthetic aperture radar. These are all mission sets where you're going to need tremendous amounts of power and data.
I guess, can you elaborate on some of those IDIQs? How do we think about the sizing of them, conversion to backlog, the timelines associated with them?
Yeah. The government has been heavily focused on essentially getting all the contractual framework in place. I know that the market in general is a little frustrated because we see these big dollars for Golden Dome and things like that, but we haven't seen tremendous amounts of action, right? What's becoming clear now is that what the government's been doing is getting these contract vehicles in place so that these dollars can start to flow. IDIQs are a big part of it, and there's a couple different varieties. There's the IDIQs where they're for 100 different companies. Look, more than likely, those are going to be very, very small over the course of years. On the other side of things, there are far more selective IDIQs, and that's where our latest wins came in.
It's a very small pool of individual companies with a very good proven track record who have now won these IDIQs. We've won two of them in two different mission sets, which are completely different than some of our past wins on things like transport. These are completely different, very small awardees with proven track records. Now we're seeing task orders come out pretty quickly. I think our team has responded to six different task orders in the past two weeks alone. They're working new ones now. The government is definitely in the mode of putting the nitrous in the tank. They've built the car. It's ready to go. The contract vehicles are all there. Now they're issuing task orders on them. I expect to see awards coming out in the next probably two to three months, I would say.
How could we think about Golden Dome? That's been one of the bigger things thrown out there. Where are you guys in that process, and how would York fit in?
Yeah. I think that we fit across numerous different sets there. Before I talk about that, I think the important piece, I think, for the market, quite frankly, to understand is, I think people think of Golden Dome like an F-35 program. It's a single product. That's, I think, not how I would think about it. Golden Dome is a significant upsizing of a very large set of capabilities the United States government already has. Moving target indicator is a mission set that they already have. Space backbone is a capability they already have. Tactical warfighter Support, space situational awareness, these are all things that actually already exist. What Golden Dome is doing is it is significantly upsizing them to support the supply chains that are required to support that kind of system.
You're not going to see one big giant win on Golden Dome for anyone. What you're going to see is lots of contract awards that support these different capabilities, towards companies that can actually produce, and they want to scale up that supply chain. That's where I mentioned earlier that we had eight different contract vehicles. One of them was transport, but seven other capabilities, like I said. We've done contracts for synthetic aperture radar. We've done contracts for missile tracking and indication. We've done advanced fire control targeting. These are all things that are required for Golden Dome, and these are the things I was alluding to, that they are beginning to issue IDIQs and task orders for now. You already see that, right? You had the billion-dollar addition and help out for L3 on the missiles, right? Why?
Missiles are definitely part of Golden Dome. You're starting to see these indicators. They're just not all called Golden Dome, but they're all capabilities. There are one unique area that we don't have now, which is space-based indicator. You do see that closely associated with Golden Dome, but it's one element, Sheila, let's say, of probably 10 that need to be in place and need to be significantly upsized.
I guess when we think about those IDIQs coming into fruition as it relates to Golden Dome, or is it just upsizing of existing contracts? How do you think it materializes in 2026, or is it more of a 2027, 2028 event?
This is obviously my opinion. Look, the contracts are in place. I think we're going to see a significant acceleration of contract awards towards the end of 2026, towards mid 2026, end of 2026, into 2027. Look, there's no hiding that politics definitely play a small part in how congressional budgets work and how things get accelerated. If there's any inkling or indication that things might change from the administrative and congressional environment that we have today, it's not going to be a surprise to say they're probably going to want to allocate those dollars and allocate them very, very quickly. They're still wrapping up the contract stuff, but that's why I see that acceleration, Sheila, is just because there's definitely a dynamic that's going to happen as we get closer to November and beyond.
Those dollars are going to get allocated pretty quickly. I think that goes into, like I said, late 2026, 2027.
Maybe I know we touched on this a little bit, but can we step back for those who weren't maybe involved in the IPO, how we think about York's addressable market as it relates to government satellite manufacturing, commercial constellation, mission operations. How do you think about the bifurcation of each of your markets and potential growth in each?
Yeah. Where we fit, we don't really even break them up. Even in the IPO, we don't break them up into different segments. We're always a mission provider. Obviously, we've invested heavily in all these different areas. Satellite manufacturing is clearly a big part of what we do. We've had some recent acquisitions that kind of bolster that supply chain and ramp it up to the levels it needs to be to support 2026 and 2027 wins. We continue to do that. We've acquired Orbion, we've acquired Solestial, ATLAS, et cetera. That bolsters that supply chain to ramp it up.
I think that what we're going to see more and more of, which this is more of a dynamic than a specific segment of the market, is what I think people aren't talking enough about is the unmanned systems and how would you actually execute that on a global scale. I think right now there's a lot of investment dollars and a lot of investment thesis in America's missing manufacturing, which it 100% is. I don't deny that thesis. The next step after that is how do you coordinate that? How do you coordinate fleets of ships, of unmanned ships, along with the manned ships that will be in these areas? Same thing with drones, whether that's terrestrial or in the air. Same kind of thing is how do you fight that kind of battle in the South China Sea or other hostile areas?
The reality is that it's satellites. Satellites is what makes the most sense to coordinate that fight. That's where we're investing strategically in the abilities through our command and control systems on our satellites, to our satellites themselves being able to talk to unmanned systems, so that you can coordinate that fight together. Right now we're in a manufacturing phase, but I think the next large market is global command and coordination of unmanned fleets, and that's where York is positioning ourselves today to take a bigger part of that market. That's where the ALL.SPACE terminals, we acquired ALL.SPACE recently, who makes basically a really good terminal that's really resistant to jamming, in communications and GPS denied environments.
Don't judge me for this.
Unmanned systems is where I see a lot of growth.
Don't judge me for this question because it seems fairly basic, but have unmanned systems always been regulated by satellites? I always thought like a Kratos or whoever, Parsons, would have a command and control system, kind of like a video game.
Yes
they would speak to each other, but it was always with satellites. With the proliferation of that, we're just going to need more and more.
There's a little bit of both. It's a very good question. It's a little bit of both. Yes, they do do a lot of coordination through systems that like Viasat makes, or GEO birds, or Starlink. What we're finding more and more is what we've seen in Ukraine is those systems get jammed. With a worthy foe and worthy capabilities, those systems get jammed. A lot of what you're actually seeing in Ukraine, and I suspect in Iran, but I can definitely confirm for Ukraine, is what's called first person view, so FPV. Yes, it's what you think. It's they got the goggles, they're flying it, and it's a pilot flying it individually. They're doing it with fiber optics because the systems are jammed in the tactical theater.
That's what we're looking at a little bit more is that's not really sustainable because all that happens is they just go after the pilots. Instead of having a plane problem, you have a pilot problem. What you really need is to be able to coordinate that in a contested environment, in theater, and that's how you can coordinate fleets. You can do it terrestrial, maybe with AI. Right now we know that, look, we have a comm capability for the tactical warfighter. We could maybe apply that to unmanned systems where they wouldn't get jammed, and they could have fight through capability. That's what we're really focused on right now.
Great. No, that's super helpful. Maybe can we talk about your footprint, just given how do you think about your footprint? You've emphasized high rate satellite manufacturing. How do you think about scalability with your current footprint? We could talk about some of the vertical integration opportunities as well.
Yeah. What we've done a little bit of is rather than having a single headquarters in a single city, we've diversified that a little bit more and we have more specialized capability. Here in Denver, in the headquarters where I'm sitting, we produce satellites downstairs. There's another mass production facility about 10 minutes south of me. That's where we can produce capacity up to 1,000 satellites per year. That's really the assembly and final testing of the satellites, but we actually support a very broad ecosystem across the United States. We have facilities where they just focus mainly on the specialization of software in Laurel, Maryland, and places like Austin, Texas, where they have really good software programs, and so we develop a lot of our software talent there.
Solestial is in Tempe, Arizona, I grew up in Arizona myself, where they're manufacturing a lot of the cells, the solar cells that we need. Orbion comes out of Michigan. There's a phenomenal university in Michigan, which I actually just visited last week. They produce really great electrical propulsion engineers, which Orbion has been able to leverage for their growth. It's more of when there's a single headquarter in a single place, you tend to deplete the supply chain of really amazing and talented people, so we diversify that a little bit. We have basically centers of excellence, and so we're located throughout the U.S. We want to continue to support all the different areas of tremendous talent throughout the U.S. I don't think there's one place that has it all for satellites.
We like to break that up a little bit and then invest in growth in those areas so we can continue to develop that talent.
Another question for you, I think this is a key theme in terms of investment in the workforce. I guess how you're thinking about head count in 2026, and along with that, how are you thinking about the biggest AI initiatives York has in place for this year?
Sure. On the head count side of things, look, most of our engineering or program management type of talent, there'll be a little bit of growth there to support continued revenue growth and continued capability. That's the beauty of our platforms is they share roughly 70%-80% of the same hardware. I'm not spending a lot of time with our engineers redesigning something every single time. It shares the same hardware. We've gone through tremendous efforts over the past four or five years of investing in making our software so that it really worked across all the platforms. The S-CLASS, LX-CLASS, and M-CLASS, which range from 200 kg-2,000 kg, have really a standardized set of core capabilities at the software level that operate across the platform.
That's why the larger footprint of engineering and program management staff, that's going to stay relatively level. It'll grow at a regular pace, not super accelerated. Production, there will definitely be a little bit more investment, in growing that staff capability. Technicians, operators, where they're actually operating the satellites and/or physically putting them together. That'll see a little bit of growth in the coming years, and that'll be split between our different areas. As far as AI, we're a little bit different in our approach to how we're approaching AI. My view is that I think AI is going to be tremendously helpful to very talented and experienced software engineers. I do not think it's going to replace them. With the onset of AI, we have not been under a reduction in staff across the software teams or anything like that.
In fact, quite the opposite. We continue to hire. What we are finding is that by implementing AI and implementing it effectively, we're making them far more efficient, where they can focus on the areas where their actual talent lies, with the architecture, and the ability to test and those kinds of things. They're leveraging AI to do a lot of the simpler base code and capability, and then they're able to manage it and keep it in that direction. That's the direction we've headed with AI, and we've found it to be very useful. We're at the early stages, there's definitely going to be some more productivity that AI's going to be able to benefit our software engineers with. We're not in the short term looking to make that staff any smaller. In fact, it will probably get a little bit larger.
Yep. I think you mentioned this on the earnings call last week or two weeks ago now. Can you talk about potentially reducing time to orbit by 75%? How do you think about the drivers, and how's that unique to York?
Yeah. No, appreciate it. One of the things that's really unique to York is because the maturity of our platforms, the three different platforms that we have, their tremendous experience in orbit executing at constellation level. Our technology roadmap has really leveled out in the sense of we know what these products are. This is important because what it enables us to do is build inventory. Now we've invested in and have procured 20 space vehicles on top of the large amounts of capabilities we already have here. With inventory, what it means is that now when we have the inventory built, a customer can come to us and say, "I need this kind of capability, York." If it's a different payload.
What we can do is we can take that payload and just focus on that, integrate that to the spacecraft platform quickly, and deliver it in our Dragoon mission, which actually just recently completed all its different milestones. We put that into orbit in seven months. When you consider what can happen, that's because we took a platform from inventory. We had one, and we integrated it, put it into orbit in seven months, and that's compared to a normal time schedule of 30 months. That's the type of significant capability that the government needs and is demanding. That's why York put our dollars in to say, "We know that the government needs this. We know that the warfighter needs this. We know the commercial customers need it. Let's invest in the inventory right now." You saw this during COVID, right?
What happened during COVID? We depleted the inventory. That's why your car, when you ordered it, took 24 months, 18 months to get to you for something that we had never thought of. I had never thought about how long it takes Honda to build my car until the inventory got depleted, and then I found out real fast. It's about 18 months is how fast it takes them to build a car. That's really the difference, Sheila, is inventory is a game changer. It will alleviate the bottlenecks in supply chain and enable everyone to deliver much more quickly.
Yeah. No, for sure. Maybe if you could talk about your recent acquisitions, whether it's Orbion with the vertical integration of propulsion systems, I think. Maybe if you could comment on the recent three acquisitions.
Yeah
where they are in their process of integration. How do you think about them each adding value?
Yeah. When we look at our acquisition strategy, there's really different two kind of buckets. One bucket is, look, are there bottlenecks in our supply chain? Are there things that we can align from a technology plan standpoint that position some of our suppliers to be able to deliver more consistently, and more quickly? That's where you're going to see Orbion was a very good addition. Propulsion systems have been just delayed in the past. That's where we can invest in, and we just were on a trip there last week where we talked to Brad and his team and said, "Look, these are the platforms that we're going to need for our M-CLASS.
We think it's going to be about these numbers of platforms that we need, and we need to know from you, Brad, what do you need to be ready to deliver on these by mid-2027? That's a very value-added conversation you can have with someone to reduce your supply chain, reduce delays, and everything else. That's what we're doing across the board. Another area was Solestial, where they build silicon cells. People don't realize right now people are building platforms and they feel like if I build one, then I can just go build 100. That is not how supply chains actually work. Right now, we are not going to be able to support the solar cell manufacturer production scale that we need to support the government's plans for proliferation. We can't. That material comes from China. They will cut it off at any second.
What's different about Solestial is they have the ability to move to a completely U.S. supply chain with silicon cells. That's why we invested with them, because we saw a roadblock happening in the next year or two of we are going to run out of solar cells. We invested in Solestial to help them scale. ATLAS was an acquisition from a little while before. We saw what we were able to add to our capabilities there. That's the supply chain bucket of how do we make sure that we're not going to have delays going forward. One of them is inventory, two is investing in supply chain. There's the other bucket. They probably don't appreciate me saying bucket. There's the other capability of more strategic envision.
This is more York has a view of what we think will happen in two to three years. Are there things that are in the way preventing us from doing that and going at scale the way that we think this industry demands us in two to three years? That's the ALL.SPACE. That's where ALL.SPACE comes in the sense of we already know that first-person view is not going to work for operating unmanned systems from Ukraine. We also know that communication in theater is a major problem in Iran. We have zero idea what is going on in there. Why is that? Because communications are fully jammed.
We know that the war, in two to three years looks like you are not going to have GPS, your communications is going to be jammed, and you are going to have pilot problems unless you can figure out how to operate from a global communications capability. That's why we acquired ALL.SPACE is because its connectivity to our space systems mean that you can provide all those things that I just said were going to be challenges. Communications and GPS in denied environments, a way to operate fleets of drones from a satellite-based constellation. There's the supply chain and the strategic, there was a rapid pace that happened there. Our IPO was actually a lot of things were in work before, the IPO bottlenecked because of the government shutdown, we weren't able to close a lot of these things.
We put ourselves in a really good position and we'll still continue to invest in those areas, although probably not at this pretty accelerated pace that we've seen in recent months.
I guess, how do you think about, last question for you, where you envision York to be over the next one to three years or two to three years as we think about the company evolving from here?
Yeah. Look, we've invested heavily in production. I think that we're one of the leaders as far as actual production capacity. We're going to ship soon the second Falcon 9 full of York spacecraft, just head to toe filled with York spacecraft. We're one of the few people that can do that in the world. We want to see that grow. We're hearing the government say that we want Golden Dome, and even if it's not called Golden Dome, we want national defense architectures, but it has to be at a scale that supports what the United States needs, and we want to be the leader in that. Obviously there's other great companies who can produce at that scale, but the difference here is that York is committed to our customers, whether that be commercial customers or military customers.
They're our customer, and we want to build what they need, and we want to be able to do it faster than anyone else. As an ancillary benefit, what we would like to see is us to be the provider for these proliferated systems, but then also the global command and control communications backbone for what the military needs in the future as far as fleets and larger scales of unmanned systems, satellite systems and manned systems.
Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for that overview and going deep with us too. Thanks, Dirk. Thank you everyone for listening. That concludes our session with York.
Thanks, Sheila. Bye.