A garage cubesat shop scales up
Terran Orbital was founded in 2013 by Marc Bell and Anthony Previte, built on the acquisition that year of Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, a small-satellite firm spun from engineers tied to Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the CubeSat standard. Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, with major operations in Irvine, California, the company grew from nanosatellites and cubesats into a vertically integrated manufacturer of larger modular spacecraft buses. Tyvak remained the engineering core, and a European arm, Tyvak International, operated out of Italy.
Going public at the top of the space-SPAC wave
In October 2021 Terran Orbital agreed to merge with Tailwind Two Acquisition Corp., a blank-check company, in a deal valuing it at roughly $1.58 billion in enterprise value and about $1.8 billion in equity. The combination closed March 25, 2022, and the company began trading on the NYSE under ticker LLAP on March 28. The merger delivered about $255 million in gross proceeds, split between equity and debt, with backers including AE Industrial Partners, Beach Point Capital, Fuel Venture Capital, and existing customer-investor Lockheed Martin. It was one of the last of the pandemic-era 'space SPACs' to reach the public markets.