York Is Buying the Terminal Layer to Become a Full Military Satcom Stack

York Space is buying the last obvious missing piece of a military satellite communications stack: the box and antenna a soldier, ship, or remote operator actually uses to stay connected. The company said in an April 29 merger agreement that it plans to acquire All.Space for about $355 million, including roughly $155 million in cash and up to 5.9 million shares. This is not just one more space-industry acquisition. It is York trying to control the full chain of a contested communications system, from spacecraft to ground software to the user terminal at the edge.

That edge matters because resilient military communications do not fail in PowerPoint. They fail when the terminal cannot hold links across different satellite networks, or when a ground system and a spacecraft bus were built as separate products that only sort of cooperate. York, a Denver satellite manufacturer focused on U.S. national security programs, has already been buying into the layers around the satellite. Last year it acquired Atlas Space Operations, whose Freedom platform offers a single API to more than 50 antennas in 20-plus countries. In March it bought Orbion Space Technology to bring electric propulsion in house for military constellation production. Now it is moving on the terminal.

The filing matters because it turns a strategic pattern into something real. York said All.Space would become an indirect wholly owned subsidiary if the deal closes, subject to the usual antitrust, foreign investment, and telecommunications approvals. The agreement also allows either side to walk if the deal has not closed within 120 days, with extensions of up to 90 more days for pending approvals.

What York is buying is a company built around phased-array satellite terminals, meaning electronically steered antennas that can switch or combine links without the mechanical dish movements older systems rely on. On its product page, All.Space says its Hydra 4 terminal can connect to four satellites simultaneously and deliver multiple full-performance links across military and commercial networks in different orbits. Company superlatives are cheap. The more useful signal is that All.Space said in March 2025 it had made its first operational Hydra terminal deployments to the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army.

Those product claims are the technical hook. All.Space says Hydra 2 can maintain two simultaneous full-performance links across geostationary orbit, medium Earth orbit, and future low Earth orbit Ka-band networks. Hydra 4 extends that to four active transmission links across Military Ka, Commercial Ka, Ku, and L-band networks, which are different radio frequency ranges used by military and commercial satellite systems. In plain English, the terminal is supposed to keep talking even as missions move between different satellite systems and frequency bands. That promise sounds abstract until a customer needs a link to survive jamming, congestion, or a handoff between networks.

SpaceNews, which first reported the deal, noted that this is York's second acquisition since it went public earlier in 2026. That chronology matters more than the M&A scorecard. York was already a satellite manufacturer with growing production ambitions. The company said on its website that its current facility footprint supports annual capacity for 1,000 spacecraft, while SpaceNews reported around the IPO that York was producing about 300 space vehicles a year and wanted to push toward 1,000. Orbion had already delivered 33 Aurora propulsion units to York for a U.S. military constellation. The shape here is not random acquisition grazing. York is assembling more of the communications stack inside one company.

That does not automatically make the strategy wise. The strongest claims about All.Space's terminal performance come from All.Space. The filing proves the merger agreement exists, not that York has bought a field-tested communications advantage. And vertical integration in defense hardware cuts both ways. Owning more of the stack can make systems easier to optimize together, but it can also make one contractor responsible for more points of failure.

Still, the logic is straightforward. If a defense customer increasingly wants a prime contractor that can provide the spacecraft, the propulsion, the ground software, and the user terminal that hops across multiple orbits, York is trying to be that contractor before someone else gets there first. The company is not just building satellites anymore. It is buying its way toward a full contested-comms package, and the terminal layer was the last conspicuous hole.