Astranis designs satellites to orbit the earth, not travel its highways. Aerospace engineers spend years hardening a spacecraft against the violence of launch and the punishing conditions of space, but far fewer plan for the journey to the launch site with the same rigor. On the interstate, a finished satellite is a one-of-a-kind machine worth hundreds of millions of dollars, moving through an environment it was never built to tolerate, with no replacement waiting on a shelf if something goes wrong. The drive lasts only a few days out of years of work, but those days concentrate vibration, temperature, handling, and schedule risks into the program’s tightest window.
What First-Time Satellite Shippers Encounter
When Astranis, a San Francisco builder of geostationary communications satellites, prepared to ship its first spacecraft to a launch facility in Florida, it had five years of engineering behind it and no experience moving one. The finished satellite had to reach the launch site by a fixed date, roughly 3,000 miles away by road.
A satellite’s engineering sets its thermal tolerances, vibration limits, and orientation requirements. A transportation plan has to keep all of it satisfied across highway conditions, climate zones, route selection, securement, and the risks of a multi-day haul. Patrick O’Donnell, McCollister’s aerospace senior project manager and a thirty-year veteran of satellite program management, approaches each move as a managed program in its own right, planned and reviewed with the manufacturer well before the spacecraft is ready to load.
For Astranis, the engagement began before the satellite was finished. McCollister’s started with a rough order of magnitude estimate based on the spacecraft’s dimensions, environmental requirements, and the hazardous materials considerations associated with its onboard batteries. From there, the team built a transportation plan covering routing, load securement, schedule, environmental controls, points of contact, safety protocols, and a graded emergency response framework.
Planning continued every two weeks as the satellite was assembled. Aerospace production schedules shift frequently, so the transportation plan had to absorb date changes without forcing the team to start over.
Why the Equipment Matters as Much as the Plan
A satellite does not ride in whatever trailer is available. “It’s not your basic reefer, the kind that hauls hamburger meat and groceries,” says Lee Latham, McCollister’s senior director of Aerospace-Aviation Solutions. “This is a climate trailer built for the aerospace industry.” It has to hold the exact temperature and humidity range a satellite manufacturer specifies, and hold it steady across days of highway travel.
McCollister’s aerospace trailers are fully enclosed, climate-controlled, and set on air-ride suspension. They load through a side door to accommodate the width of satellite containers, and their wood floors are fitted with logistic straps and bull rings engineered to secure aerospace payloads during sustained highway travel. For the Astranis move, the satellite rode inside a container the company had built to its own specification, carried within the climate-controlled trailer. Together, the container and trailer gave the payload two layers of protection for the length of the trip.
Protection begins before the payload enters the trailer, with the route itself. The most direct path from California to Florida ran north, but McCollister’s recommended the southern I-10 corridor instead, because the climate along it stays steadier and warmer at that time of year. The team also knew the permitting landscape across the southern states, where authorities are used to handling aerospace loads. The routes these large, high-value loads travel rarely match the ones a typical vehicle would take: bridge heights, construction zones, lane widths, and county-level permitting all shape the path before a wheel turns.
Planning for the Moment Something Goes Wrong
A transportation team’s readiness becomes clearest when equipment fails, weather closes in, or the route no longer unfolds as planned.
For the Astranis program, McCollister’s assigned a defined response to each of four levels of disruption: a flat tire, a tractor or trailer breakdown, a catastrophic equipment failure, and a weather emergency bearing down on the route. Each level carried its own protocol, so the road team could follow an agreed plan rather than improvise one in the moment.
The climate control unit received its own contingency plan. McCollister’s provided Astranis with a nationwide map of around-the-clock Thermo King service facilities so that a mechanical failure on the environmental unit would never put the payload at risk while the team searched for a repair option. The plan also identified safe havens along the route where the load could be held securely overnight if the truck arrived ahead of schedule, with security options available up to and including armed guards.
The trip itself ran as a continuous team drive, two drivers trading shifts around the clock and stopping only for federally required rest and fuel. The reasoning is simple: every hour a satellite spends parked is an hour of unnecessary exposure, and a continuous drive minimizes the time the payload spends stationary and vulnerable.
What the Relationship Became
The first Astranis satellite reached Florida on schedule with no damage documented. In aerospace transport, delivering the payload intact is the measure that matters most.
McCollister’s has since moved every satellite Astranis has shipped, including a later mission that carried multiple spacecraft at once as the company’s production grew. Since that first delivery, Astranis has put five spacecraft in orbit and sold more than a billion dollars in satellite services, with contracts spanning sovereign broadband and US Space Force programs. The first move established a model the two companies could repeat, refine, and scale. After each shipment, the team runs a post-mortem comparing actual cost against the estimate, identifying improvements, and carrying operational lessons into the next transport. Those refinements compound over time. A program that began with a single truck and a first-time shipper is now a standing partnership between a manufacturer scaling production and a transportation team that has evolved alongside it. As Lee Latham puts it, “It’s a continued and even an expanding relationship. As they grow, we scale to support them.”
Astranis ultimately moved its launch timeline forward after the first successful overland delivery, a rare outcome in an industry where program dates almost always slip rather than accelerate. An Astranis team member said after the move: “We successfully shipped one of these satellites across the country. I’m so much more confident that we can go do this now.”
The companies building the next generation of satellites already know how to build them. Fewer arrive knowing how to move them. The programs that get it right treat the overland journey as part of the mission and give it the same seriousness as the launch, planning it well before the spacecraft is ready to leave the floor.
For more than two decades, McCollister’s Aerospace has helped manufacturers plan and execute overland spacecraft moves, from environmental controls and route selection to contingency planning and delivery.