WASHINGTON — Italian smallsat developer Argotec has unveiled a new modular satellite bus design that it believes provides flexibility in accommodating a wide range payloads.
The company announced the Hawk Plus satellite design March 11 during the Satellite 2025 conference. The design uses modular panels that can be swapped out using a plug-and-play architecture to accommodate different mission needs.
“What we are introducing is one flexible platform which, on one hand, is standardized enough to offer a high level of industrialization, but on the other hand, is designed to accommodate flexibility and to evolve over time in order to cope with different missions,” said Emilio Fazzoletto, head of product management at Argotec, during a presentation about Hawk Plus.
The design uses a series of modular panels hosting different subsystems, such as power and communications, that can be reconfigured to meet different mission needs. That design builds on the heritage of the satellites Argotec is building for the IRIDE Italian Earth observation constellation.
One advantage of the design, he said, is that it decouples the payload from the bus. “You can install the payload at a later stage,” he said. “It also means that payload integration can happen at later stage, also at facilities other than ours. So, for example, we can let our customers integrate classified payloads at their facilities.”
Argotec opted for a modular approach rather than try to develop a family of buses of different sizes and capabilities to meet customer needs. “They want something that already exists, but it’s hard to have something that already exists with almost no NRE [non-recurring engineering] and fit their unique payload into it,” said Corbett Hoenninger, U.S. managing director of Argotec, in an interview.
The company plans to produce the Hawk Plus modules at its new SpacePark headquarters and production facility in Turin, Italy, that it opened last October, with the option to also produce them in the United States at a facility it is developing Florida. That opens up what Hoenninger called “hybrid” approaches, where the bus modules are produced in Italy and shipped to the U.S. for final assembly and payload integration.
