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Sourcery · 2 min · Aug 31, 2026

Northwood is bringing time-critical manufacturing in-house

Bridgit Mendler walks through planned antenna lines, testing chambers, machining and PCB assembly. Bringing work in-house can help Northwood control steps that constrain production timelines.

Bridgit Mendler

Bridgit Mendler is cofounder and CEO of Northwood Space.

Co-founded Northwood Space, building shared satellite ground infrastructure; earlier a Disney Channel actress and singer.

  • Molly O'Shea, Host · Founder, Sourcery

    Ex-Upfront Ventures investor; has interviewed Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey.

About this segment

Bridgit Mendler walks through planned antenna lines, testing chambers, machining and PCB assembly. Bringing work in-house can help Northwood control steps that constrain production timelines.

From “Bridgit Mendler Gives Us the First Tour of Northwood's New HQ + Factory”, Aug 31, 2026. Watch the full episode

“We're going to be doing PCB assembly as well, basically bringing in all the different parts of the supply chain that are kind of, you know, imposing timeline restrictions”
Bridgit Mendlerat 40:09 · Sourcery40:09

Takeaways

  1. Multiple product lines will run in parallel.
  2. Anechoic chambers test antenna signal performance.
  3. Machining and PCB assembly will move in-house.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 2:45Ground infrastructure lagged because the industry split the work5:55
  2. 23:07Northwood wants revenue growth before expanding its scope3:18
  3. 26:20Ground networks use costly redundancy to guarantee reliability2:57
  4. 13:28The Space Force contract is a trial for a larger engagement2:23
  5. 17:11Northwood uses site diversity to limit the impact of outages2:19
  6. 8:36Space companies still need real businesses today2:12

  7. 38:11Northwood is bringing time-critical manufacturing in-house2:23

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Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 38:14

    are really interesting, huge bays. Yeah. Yeah. So like when you're scaling up production, you have to think about a couple of different pieces together. You have to think about how do you have a resilient supply chain strategy? So that does factor into more of the inventory supply. You have to think about how do you actually have the production line space to be able to have all of those units run through their assembly process. You also have to think about what is the testing apparatuses for them. And then there are going to be things that we're sourcing in from inventory, but there's also going to be things that we're building ourselves in-house. So So we have things come through shipping and receiving over here.

  2. 38:52

    We're going to have our antenna production lines running here for multiple product lines, so kind of running in parallel, side by side. In this back corner over here, you can actually start to see that's our anechoic chamber starting to get stood up. So yeah, we're going to have our chambers over here for testing. So when you're building out antennas, you need to do a couple of different testing processes.

  3. 39:15

    You need to do the anechoic chamber, for example, where you test the signals on the antenna to make sure that it can operate as it's expected. For people who don't know what an anechoic chamber is, can you explain that? A lot of blue spiky foam that looks really cool, and it just protects all the integrity of the signals. Because, believe it or not, where we're standing right now has a bunch of different signals and noise interfering.

  4. 39:43

    So it basically creates a very isolated environment where you can just like focus on on the performance of that antenna. And so then back to what you were asking over here, we're gonna have a lot of that inventory supply and we're also going to have our machining shops. And so those are gonna be for components that we're actually building in house. So when we are building out different antenna feeds, for example, like we will build an all new antenna feed that we then test in the chamber to validate its performance. We're going to be doing PCB assembly as well, basically bringing in all the different parts of the supply chain that are kind of, you know, imposing timeline restrictions and things like that. And we're going to put them here at Northwood so that we can control it test it and then assemble it all together cool should we walk over