Ghalam LLP is a Kazakhstani spacecraft manufacturing joint venture founded in 2010 between Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary (KGS) and Airbus Defence and Space, established to build a technological and industrial base in Kazakhstan for designing, manufacturing, assembling, and testing spacecraft, payload components, and space hardware elements.
Ghalam operates a full-cycle production facility in Astana covering precision milling and turning (machining envelopes up to 1800x700x700 mm, accuracy down to 6 microns), sheet-metal forming and laser cutting, TIG/MIG welding of stainless steel, titanium, and aluminum structures, and additive manufacturing with titanium alloy powders. The company also runs dedicated electronics assembly and test areas, including automated SMT placement (008004 to BGA/QFN/QFP components, up to 25,000 placements/hour), vapor-phase reflow, and automated optical inspection (AOI) to IPC standards, as well as cable harness assembly for aerospace applications.
On the spacecraft engineering side, Ghalam provides systems architecture design, RF link-budget and antenna analysis, mechanical and thermal structural analysis, optical payload design (visible and near-infrared), embedded software development and verification for electronic modules, and full-cycle design/production of computing, RF, and power electronics modules. Its environmental test capabilities include vibration and acoustic testing, thermal-vacuum testing, EMC testing, and mass properties (mass, center of gravity, moments of inertia) measurement for small spacecraft and components.
Ghalam also operates an ISO 8 clean-room optical metrology laboratory for evaluating image quality of optical systems, and supports in-orbit spacecraft operations including communication sessions and data collection/processing, plus AI/ML-based data analysis both onboard and on the ground segment. The company traces its heritage to Kazakhstan's KazEOSat-1/KazEOSat-2 remote-sensing satellite program.
