SpaceX acquires parachute company for $2.2M, because it turns out space-rated parachutes are very hard.

SpaceX is known for its vertical integration, but one component it’s been outsourcing is parachutes — until earlier this month, when the company quietly acquired parachute vendor Pioneer Aerospace after its parent company went bankrupt. The Information first reported the news.

This is the second known acquisition for SpaceX, which acquired small satellite startup Swarm in 2021 for a $524 million mostly-stock deal. Pioneer is coming much more cheaply: SpaceX has snapped it up for just $2.2 million, according to a bankruptcy filing by Pioneer’s parent company in Florida.

Pioneer provides the drogue parachutes for SpaceX’s Dragon capsules, the spacecraft line that NASA uses to transport cargo and astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Drogue chutes are extremely sophisticated components designed for high velocity; in the case of Dragon, the chute deploys after the capsule has reentered through much of the atmosphere, to stabilize the spacecraft and slow it down a little bit.

According to NASA, the two drogues deploy when the Dragon is at 18,000 feet in altitude, moving at around 350 miles per hour. (The main chutes are deployed later during reentry, at around 6,000 feet in altitude; SpaceX buys those from Airborne Systems.)