Beyond Reach Labs Opens Brooklyn Plant to Build Football-Field-Sized Solar Arrays

Aerospace startup Beyond Reach Labs will formally open a 16,000-square-foot manufacturing and testing facility at Brooklyn's Industry City complex on September 24, 2026. The site will house dedicated hardware assembly lines for Flarewing, a high-density deployable solar array built for orbital power systems.

The company, founded by SpaceX veterans and backed by venture accelerator Y Combinator, is targeting the electrical power limits that constrain commercial space stations, high-power orbital computing hubs, and direct-to-device communications platforms. Flarewing is designed to address the physical volume and power generation constraints faced by those platforms.

Flarewing uses a deployable array architecture with a compact stowed volume engineered to fit standard payload fairings during launch. In its stowed configuration, the system folds down to the dimensions of a standard dining table. Once in orbit, its mechanical articulation system unfurls the solar blanket structure to the length of a football field.

By optimizing structural mass and blanket packing density, Flarewing generates up to ten times more electrical power per launch vehicle than traditional rigid solar panel assemblies. The company states that this high power-to-mass ratio enables orbital data centers and private space station modules to operate megawatt-class payloads without requiring multiple dedicated launch campaigns for power infrastructure.

The Brooklyn site will host cleanroom integration space and environmental testing equipment to qualify initial Flarewing flight units ahead of commercial demonstration launches. Beyond Reach Labs will begin equipment integration and solar array deployment testing at the facility following the opening ceremony.

According to the company, the expansion of commercial low Earth orbit infrastructure has exposed severe electrical power limits across legacy space hardware platforms. Orbital computing clusters and commercial space stations require continuous high-wattage power generation, yet conventional rigid or accordion-style solar arrays exhaust launch vehicle fairing volume before meeting operational electrical loads. Beyond Reach Labs says high-yield, compact deployables allow satellite operators and orbital station developers to scale onboard compute capability, active cooling loops, and high-throughput communications arrays.

Following the September 24 opening, Beyond Reach Labs will initiate equipment integration and solar array deployment testing at the Brooklyn facility as it works to qualify its first Flarewing flight units for commercial demonstration launches.