Northwood Blog

The plant more than quintuples the company's manufacturing footprint, brings antenna production onto assembly lines, and will add 400 jobs over the next three years.

TORRANCE, Calif., August 31, 2026 —Northwood Space Corp. (Northwood), which builds the network connecting satellites to Earth, today opened a new 185,000-square-foot headquarters and factory in Torrance, California, and expanded production of its satellite ground network. The new facility grows the company’s manufacturing footprint more than fivefold, from 25,000 to 135,000 square feet, and will turn out hundreds of antennas per year. It answers a bottleneck that has caught up with the space industry: the links carrying data from orbit down to Earth have not kept pace with the satellites going up.

Thousands of satellites now circle the planet, but the ground networks that handle their data are built and work much as they always have. They still lean on bespoke dishes that are slow to manufacture and deploy at rate. Northwood is rebuilding that network from the ground up, starting with taking novel antenna designs from prototype to mass production. Northwood standardizes antennas into modular parts that recombine for different space missions, cutting cost and shortening ground-site build and deployment times.

Northwood’s approach to building a network is to take many small antennas and, with methods developed in-house, make them perform like one big dish. Because the pieces are small, a crew can set them up in the field in hours instead of months. Northwood also handles the site work and the permits, then ties the hardware together with software. Under the old model, every operator would build its own stations and wait months to years for new ones if they needed to expand coverage. Northwood replaces that with a software-defined, shared network that any space mission can plug into. For example, our Portal product can combine multiple arrays to reproduce the gain of a 7.3m dish. This drives down delivery time from 3 years to 3 months and delivers 10x the number of links.

“This facility represents the next stage for Northwood's growth,” said Bridgit Mendler, co-founder and CEO of Northwood. “We have demonstrated capability across two product lines, Portal and Prism, and now we have the infrastructure to press print on building the network with scaled links and throughput."

The expansion comes as commercial operators and allied governments press for connections to orbit that are reliable, resilient, and high-throughput.Northwood's ground network keeps operators in contact with their satellites across every orbit, so the ground segment no longer limits how fast they grow or which missions they can fly.

“Northwood’s decision to establish its headquarters and dramatically expand manufacturing in Torrance is a powerful vote of confidence in our city and our highly skilled workforce,” said City of Torrance Mayor Sharon Kalani, “This new facility will help create 400 high-quality jobs and further strengthen the aerospace and advanced manufacturing sector shaping Torrance’s future. We are proud to support Northwood’s continued growth and innovation.”

Inside the facility

The Torrance plant adds three dedicated production lines for Northwood’s network hardware and brings more of the build in-house:

• A Portal phased-array line - At full ramp, this line will produce more than a full ground site's worth of Portal panels each month. Portal is the USB- and SGLS-capable array Northwood customers already use for satellite telemetry, tracking and control (TT&C) across proliferated and multi-orbit constellations.
  
• A Prism parabolic line - At full ramp, this line will produce four Prism parabolic antennas per week. Live on the network today, Prism is Northwood's high-throughput dish, moving SATCOM and mission data across S-, X-, and Ka-bands then scaling to ultra-high throughput links.
  
• A printed circuit board (PCB) assembly line – Assembling boards in-house cuts about three months off the lead times for new phased-array antenna designs, letting Northwood revise its hardware without waiting on outside suppliers.
  
• Expanded manufacturing and machining – Purpose-built machining lines will produce antenna feeds, amplifiers, and other RF hardware, keeping Northwood's highest-precision components under one roof.
  
• Hardware-in-the-Loop (HITL) Radio Frequency (RF) and PCB test areas – Several anechoic chambers will let Northwood test antennas and RF components in-house, and dedicated PCB test space will support rate production of complex mixed-signal boards.

The building also sets aside dedicated space for R&D and for new products aimed at low-latency, high-throughput links as Northwood expands across the full stack of ground-to-space networking. Production moves to the new facility in October 2026, and the site will add 400 jobs over the next three years.