Moog taps Redwire to provide solar arrays for Meteor
Moog has locked Redwire in as the standard solar array supplier for its METEOR satellite bus, selecting the company's new ELSA wings for a $12.8 million contract supporting a low Earth orbit mission for an undisclosed national security customer.
The award, announced March 24, 2026, marks the first sale of Redwire's Extensible Low-Profile Solar Array — a product the company quietly discussed on an earnings call February 26 before debuting it publicly March 3. The speed from earnings-call preview to booked contract is not nothing. That suggests either unusually fast procurement movement or a customer whose requirements were already well-defined, and possibly both.
ELSA is designed to provide up to 50 percent more power per unit of volume than Redwire's Roll-Out Solar Array, or ROSA, which has a 100 percent on-orbit success rate across the International Space Station and NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission. ROSA is proven hardware. ELSA is the answer to a question about what you do when you need more power density in the same envelope — which matters when you are flying a bus that has to fit inside an ESPA-Grande ring and still put out enough watts to justify its existence.
The METEOR bus itself is not new. It builds on the Moog Meteorite small satellite buses already on orbit supporting a national security mission. METEOR steps up to the ESPA-Grande class, which accommodates payloads up to 700 kilograms, and uses radiation-hardened avionics with payload-configurable flight software. The bus is LEO-capable and designed to span from that regime into deeper space, according to Moog's prior public documentation.
Mike Gold, president of Redwire's Space business segment, framed the deal as a design win: ELSA baselined as standard on METEOR means production repetition, which is where solar array manufacturers actually make money. "Engineered for volume production" is how Redwire chairman and CEO Peter Cannito described ELSA on the company's earnings call. That language matters. A solar array that ships once is a novelty. A solar array that ships as standard equipment on a bus that may fly on multiple missions for a national security customer is a product line.
Bob McArthur, Moog Space Vehicles general manager, said the wings integrate directly with the METEOR architecture — no custom harness work, no unique deployment mechanism. Standard interfaces are the point. If you are building a constellation, you want every bus arriving with the same solar wing interface so integration is a checklist item, not a custom engineering project.
The ESPA-Grande form factor has been gaining traction as a standard way to package small satellites large enough to do real work. The adapter itself started as a secondary payload interface for the EELV program; Moog's version of it became a bus architecture in its own right. The fact that Moog is standardizing on a single solar array supplier for METEOR suggests the company sees ESPA-Grande as a durable bus class, not a one-generation platform.
What Redwire's numbers do not hide: the company reported $335.4 million in revenue for 2025, up 10.3 percent from 2024, and a net loss of $226.6 million — nearly double the $114.3 million loss in 2024. Redwire projected $450 million to $500 million in revenue for 2026. The guidance is optimistic; the losses are not. Redwire acquired drone developer Edge Autonomy in 2025, which has likely contributed to cost structure without yet showing up as revenue growth. For a solar array supplier, the difference between a design win and a profitable program is usually measured in how many units actually ship.
The satellite bus market is worth $3.69 billion in 2026 and projected to reach $7.39 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence — a compound annual growth rate of roughly 15 percent. That growth is being driven in part by the same national security and commercial constellation demand that put Meteorite buses on orbit. If METEOR scales beyond its first mission, ELSA scales with it. That is the bet.
The customer remains undisclosed. Given the national security context, that is standard. What matters is that the hardware is real, the bus is flying, and the interface is standardized. Whether the production cadence justifies the 2026 revenue guidance is a question for the next earnings call.
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