Beyond Reach Labs opens Brooklyn plant for large space solar arrays

(SpaceEnergy) Beyond Reach Labs has opened a 16,000-square-foot research and manufacturing facility in Brooklyn, New York, to develop and produce large deployable solar arrays for high-power orbital infrastructure.

The facility at Industry City will serve as the company's research and manufacturing base for Flarewing, a patent-pending deployable solar-array structure intended for high-powered satellites, commercial space stations and orbital data centres.

Industry City said Flarewing is designed to compress to about the size of a dining table for launch and expand to the length of a football field in orbit, producing up to 10 times more power per launch than traditional solar panels.

Beyond Reach Labs' official technical material identifies three Flarewing configurations. The largest, Flarewing-L, has a 625m² deployed area and maximum beginning-of-life output per wing of 125kW using silicon cells or 200kW using triple-junction cells.

The Brooklyn site provides the company with industrial power, freight infrastructure and space to scale hardware production. Beyond Reach Labs is also expanding its workforce at the facility.

The company's official website says its arrays are intended to address structural-dynamics constraints that become increasingly significant as orbital power systems grow in scale.