Not since the 80’s, when the South African Government established the Houwteq site, has there been a South African facility constructed from the ground-up to handle spacecraft manufacture, assembly, integration and test (MAIT). This makes the NewSpace Systems (NSS) commercially funded expansion, which encompasses the construction of a new facility designed from its foundations up to address the specific satellite manufacture and test requirements, a first in South Africa.

While NSS has continued to expand incrementally over the last several years, this latest expansion project will see the production capacity of NSS more than double, and makes provision for running several client-specific production lines in parallel. Through its support of five international constellation programs, in addition to numerous national and commercial missions, NSS has responded to its customers’ requests to scale in order to meet the rising global demand for its ADCS products.

In addition to its growing manufacturing facility in Cape Town, South Africa, the NSS innovation team has moved out to a second location nearby, where they have the benefit of dedicated laboratory areas for the R&D projects they are working on. There is also extensive co-development and project-specific activities which are being outsourced to the NSS teams based in the United Kingdom and New Zealand.