SolAero’s Expansion of Capacity and Capabilities to Meet Emerging Demand for Radiation Hard III-V Solar Cells

SolAero by Rocket Lab, is the largest supplier of high-efficiency, multi-junction, space-grade solar cells. The demand for more solar cells and panels to power national security, civil space and commercial satellites, however, has been growing steadily to record levels for the past few years, creating a global constraint on the supply of these solar cells. This trend is also expected to continue for the foreseeable future. To address this constraint, recently, we executed a CHIPS and Science Act agreement with the US Government, to enable expanding our compound semiconductor production capacity by ~50%. This capacity expansion is expected to take about three years to complete. We have also experienced increasing demand for our higher efficiency product lines, with business predominantly shifting to solar cell architectures that have >3 active junctions (3J), with our 4-junction Z4J+ cell quickly dominating our production and customer demand. The Ge-based Z4J+ cell is exhibiting an average beginning-of-life (BOL) conversion efficiency of 31.3%, with an average power remaining factor of 90% after exposure to 1-MeV electron irradiation at a fluence of 1E15 e/cm2. This represents a >6% and >11% improvement at Beginning-of-Life (BOL) and at End-of-Life (EOL) power output, respectively, as compared to our heritage 3J solar cell products.