MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES

The story starts in 1969 at the University of British Columbia, where two engineers named John MacDonald and Vern Dettwiler founded MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates to commercialize space technology research. Their most famous early achievement was the Canadarm — the robotic arm that Canada contributed to NASA's Space Shuttle program in 1981 and then the International Space Station.

MDA became the backbone of Canada's space program.

In California, a separate story was unfolding. DigitalGlobe was founded in 1992 (originally as Worldview Imaging Corporation) with the radical premise that commercial satellites could image the Earth in high enough resolution to be useful for governments and businesses.

Walter Scott was one of the driving forces. The company launched a succession of WorldView satellites that changed what was possible from orbit.

In 2017, MDA acquired DigitalGlobe for $2.4 billion and renamed the combined company Maxar Technologies in 2018. The merger created the first company to integrate satellite manufacturing with the operation of a commercial Earth observation constellation and the analysis of that data for government and commercial customers.

Maxar makes money two ways. First, it sells satellite imagery and analytics — governments, mapping companies, and agricultural firms pay to access the world's highest-resolution commercial imagery archive and new captures from the WorldView constellation.

Google Maps and Apple Maps license Maxar imagery. US intelligence agencies pay for exclusive access to certain products.

Second, it builds satellites and space infrastructure for customers — including government-ordered surveillance satellites and the spacecraft hardware for commercial operators.

The government side is the more valuable part. The NRO and NGA pay hundreds of millions annually for priority access to Maxar's imaging capacity.

That revenue is sticky and grows with the defense budget.

WorldView-3 is the flagship imaging satellite — capable of 31cm panchromatic resolution, meaning objects less than a foot across are visible from orbit. WorldView Legion is the next-generation constellation of six satellites designed to image any location on earth multiple times per day.

Maxar's Securenet platform distributes classified and unclassified imagery to US government customers. The Maxar Intelligence Platform is the cloud-based analytics product sold to commercial and allied government customers.

The company also manufactures geostationary communication satellites through its Space Systems/Loral heritage.

The core insight behind Maxar's growth was vertical integration. The old model in commercial space was to build satellites or operate them or analyze the data — but rarely all three.

Maxar bet that controlling the entire chain, from building the spacecraft to owning the orbit slot to selling the finished intelligence product, would give it pricing power and margin that pure-play operators could not match.

The Ukraine moment was not planned but validated the strategy perfectly. By releasing unclassified imagery publicly during the Russian buildup, Maxar demonstrated its relevance to a global audience in a way that no marketing campaign could have achieved.

Demand for commercial satellite intelligence from allied governments surged after 2022.

Debt. The $2.4 billion DigitalGlobe acquisition loaded Maxar with over $3 billion in net debt, and the company's stock collapsed from $70 in late 2018 to under $10 by late 2022 as investors grew skeptical about whether the balance sheet could be managed while simultaneously funding the WorldView Legion next-generation satellite constellation.

The WorldView Legion program required hundreds of millions in capital expenditure at the worst possible moment in the company's debt cycle. The Advent take-private was the resolution — but it required the stock price to get low enough first.

Maxar was publicly traded on both the NYSE and TSX (ticker: MAXR) until January 2023. Institutional investors including defense-focused and growth funds held significant positions during its public life.

The stock was a disaster between 2018 and 2022 — falling from over $70 to under $10 — before Advent International offered $53 per share in a take-private deal valued at $6.4 billion. Advent was attracted by Maxar's dominant position in commercial satellite imagery and its deep, sticky relationships with US intelligence agencies.