Quilty: Electric Propulsion Thruster Supply Shaky
The satellite industry faces an electric propulsion thruster supply bottleneck, with the largest producer -- Russia's EDB Fakel -- banned from Western supply chains and numerous other EP vendors unable to fill the gap, Quilty Space's Caleb Henry wrote Monday.…
"As it turns out, [EP] thrusters, especially the Hall-Effect thrusters [proliferated low earth orbit] operators fancy, are extremely hard to manufacture at scale," he said. While several U.S. companies have developed Hall-Effect thrusters of their own or licensed the technology, almost all are still struggling to scale production after years of effort, he said.