On Tuesday, California-based K2 Space announced its new contract with Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch three K2 satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket for a 2027 mission dubbed "Trinity," which will lift three satellites into low, medium and geostationary transfer orbit.
"We are bringing something brand new to the satellite bus industry," according to Karan Kunjur, K2 Space's co-founder and CEO.
The Trinity Mission will follow K2's other SpaceX-linked mission Gravitas as part of a separate rideshare space mission.
Trinity, like Gravitas, will "support a hybrid customer base of U.S. government and commercial partners" as its mission.
K2 company officials added it underlined the "power of leveraging commercial innovation for national security objectives."
California's K2 Space Corporation, founded in 2022 by former SpaceX engineers, develops high-powered, low-cost satellite bus platforms. A satellite bus is the primary structural platform of a satellite that provides propulsion, guidance, power and more.
In January, K2 officials named John Plumb, former assistant U.S. secretary of Defense for space policy, as its head of strategy.
Plumb stated Tuesday that the overall mission was not just about delivering satellites.
"It's about strengthening national security and advancing the U.S. commercial space economy by delivering powerful platforms at low cost and at scale," he said.
According to Plumb, K2's approach to deploying its satellites means it has been "aggressively pushing the boundaries of what is technologically possible in a smart, deliberate way."
Kunjur said in a statement that K2 was building a "true multi-orbit satellite that can proliferate" in low-earth orbit in addition to medium-earth orbit and to geostationary levels or beyond.
"Rather than simply stating we can proliferate all those orbits, we decided to prove it by deploying into all three orbital regimes on one rocket launch," the K2 chief added Tuesday.
The K2 announcement comes after SpaceX on Monday successfully executed its 11th flight test of its two-stage, heavy-lift launch Starship designed to ultimately take humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars.
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