Does the New Hawk Plus Design Offer Flexible Payload Solutions?
Mar 19, 2025
Italian smallsat developer Argotec is unveiling a groundbreaking modular satellite bus design that would revolutionize the market, providing an unparalleled versatility when it comes to accommodating a wide range of payloads. On March 11, the company unveiled its new Hawk Plus satellite design at the Satellite 2025 conference, which is an advanced satellite design that could bring a sea change in how spacecraft are developed and deployed. The key innovation of this platform is the use of interchangeable modular panels with plug-and-play architecture to extract the full benefits of having both standardization and industrialization capabilities while still being able to customize to meet various mission needs.
Argotec’s Hawk Plus satellite features modular components for diverse payloads. Credit: Argotec
Emilio Fazzoletto of Argotec adds that the Hawk Plus finds a perfect balance between industrial standardization to reduce costs and capability tech readiness to meet evolving mission needs. The design allows for the subsystems such as power and communications to be hosted in different series of modular panels that could be reconfigured based on the specific mission parameters. Argotec’s approach is based on the company’s extensive experience in designing satellites for the IRIDE Italian Earth observation constellation and continues the progress made in the development of satellite technology through the incremental design and practical application.
The Hawk Plus design has one of the biggest advantages: being able to separate payload integration from bus development, allowing an unprecedented flexibility in manufacturing. This separation allows payloads to be installed at later stages of production and even at facilities outside of Argotec’s own, and thus allows customers to integrate classified payloads at their secure location. This modular approach was selected by Argotec instead of developing multiple bus sizes with different capabilities in order to satisfy the common customer need for existing solutions with minimum non recurring engineering cost while still accommodating for unique payload requirements. Modules for the Hawk Plus will be manufactured by the company at its newly opened SpacePark headquarters and production facility in Turin, Italy, which opened in October 2024. This state of the art facility massively expands Argotec’s production capacity with 11,500 square meters, including 1,000 square meters of clean rooms dedicated to satellite assembly. In addition, the company is building a facility in Florida, giving the company the option to produce buses using what U.S. Managing Director Corbett Hoenninger calls ‘hybrid’ production — producing bus modules in Italy and shipping them to the United States for final assembly, payload integration and testing.
The SpacePark facility itself is a unique combination of architectural history and cutting edge space technology. Instead of building a new building, Argotec decided to renovate an existing structure that was originally designed by Oscar Niemeyer almost four decades ago for a paper company. The round shape of the building was very similar to a science fiction spaceship and needed to be modified to fit clean rooms and mission control centers, for which Argotec invested 25 million euros in renovation. The company’s environmental values were being upheld by this approach since it avoided the ecological impact of new construction and created, they say, one of Europe’s most advanced space factories. SpacePark HUB, an accelerator program launched by Argotec to support startups innovating technologies that can improve Argotec’s spacecraft, has allocated 1,200 square meters in the SpacePark. The goal of this initiative is to give companies with products already at technology readiness levels six or seven one to two years of collaborative development to perfect their technologies for space applications. At a production rate of up to one satellite per week, the SpacePark facility is aimed at producing satellites for projects such as the IRIDE Earth observation constellation for which Argotec recently extended its contract from 10 to 25 satellites.
