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APRIL 8, 2013
INSIDE
Phantom Works
Smallsats
www.spacenews.com
See page 6
VOLUME 24 ISSUE 14 $4.95 ($7.50 Non-U.S.)
AsiaSat To Finance and Host
Commercial Weather Sensor
PROFILE/38>
RICHARD F.
AMBROSE
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT,
LOCKHEED MARTIN SPACE SYSTEMS
PETER B. de SELDING, PARIS
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
CIVIL SPACE
Commercial Crew Budget Safe for Now
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the budget for the agency’s Commercial Crew Program is
safe from sequestration — for now. See story, page 15
MILITARY SPACE
Europe Eyes DoD for Laser Comm System
Europe is targeting the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) as a major prospective customer
for its satellite data-relay system. See story, page 4
Sequestration May Force Contract Changes
Sequestration could force the U.S. Air Force to renegotiate some fixed-price satellite contracts
unless the service can find a way to restore the funding. See story, page 6
Europe Moves Out Tentatively on SSA
The European Space Agency opened a new space weather center as France and Germany embark
on a related but separate bilateral space situational awareness (SSA) effort. See story, page 12
S
atellite fleet operator AsiaSat of Hong Kong said
April 3 it had tentatively
entered into a $185 million
partnership with startup commercial satellite weather-data
provider GeoMetWatch (GMW)
to place a GMW-designed hyperspectral sounding instrument on an AsiaSat satellite to
launch in 2016.
AsiaSat said it will finance,
on its own, the purchase of the
sensor and its integration onto
an AsiaSat satellite to operate at
122 degrees east longitude in
geostationary orbit, and incur
the associated operating costs.
The company said the project’s
total cost should be no more
than $185 million including finance charges.
In return, Las Vegas-based
GMW will issue, by July 31, a
convertible note to AsiaSat of a
value that the two companies
have not yet settled, AsiaSat said
Problems Continue with GPS Ground System
in a filing with the Hong Kong
Stock Exchange.
G M W, t h r o u g h a H o n g
Kong-based special-purpose
company, will also pay AsiaSat a
cost-contribution fee and a service fee, with amounts
dependent in part on what the
two companies agree on as a
reasonable cash-flow projection
for the business of selling
weather data in the Asia-Pacific
region.
GMW also must obtain U.S.
government authorizations for
the partnership by July 31.
AsiaSat is requiring GMW to
submit guarantees from “a
guarantor acceptable to AsiaSat” that GMW will be able to
meet its obligations under the
agreement.
The two companies will share
revenue from the GMW sensor,
AsiaSat said.
GMW Chief Executive
David J. Crain said that with
the AsiaSat agreement in
hand, his company will now
approach the half-dozen nations that have indicated an interest in his service and ask for
formal commitments. If GMW
can transform the current informal agreements into firm
backlog, the company will
have an easier time raising
money.
I n a n A p r i l 4 i n t e r v i e w,
Crain said GMW will be reimbursing AsiaSat its $185 million
advance through the service
revenue generated. Once the
reimbursement is complete,
the two companies will share
the revenue.
The sounder instrument is
based on hardware originally
developed for NASA and then
modified by Utah State University’s Advanced Weather Systems laboratory.
Scott Jensen, director of
the Advanced Weather Systems facility, said the university and NASA have resolved all
SEE ASIASAT PAGE 4
Scientists Excited by Possible Detection of Dark Matter
A congressional watchdog agency says the ground system for the next generation GPS 3 satellites faces significant delays and cost growth. See story, page 14
SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS
Latin American Operators See Steady Demand
Latin American satellite operators agree that their region’s bull market in satellite bandwidth has
plenty of life left in it. See story, page 10
Intelsat Moves Forward with $800 Million IPO
Intelsat Global moved forward with its long-planned initial public offering (IPO) of stock in
a transaction valued at up to $823 million. See story, page 10
>
3NEWS BRIEFS/
31LAUNCH REPORT/
31ON THE MOVE/
34COMMENTARY
NASA PHOTO
>FEATURES
Scientists say the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 02 —— attached to the international space station —— has observed a striking pattern of antimatter particles called positrons that may turn out to be a product of collisions between dark matter particles. See story, page 29
PERIODICALS-NEWSPAPER HANDLING
LAUNCH
SMART
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I N T E R NAT I O NAL
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© 2013 Lockheed Martin Corporation
THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND®
LESS SEARCH.
MORE RESCUE.
The COSPAS-SARSAT system has saved 33,000 lives in 30 years. We helped launch this critical international
service—integrating and testing search-and-rescue payloads, building NOAA weather satellites that host
them, and placing them in orbit with Atlas rockets. COSPAS-SARSAT: just one example of how Lockheed Martin
provides innovative space systems, large and small, that perform any mission with excellence.
www.lockheedmartin.com
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www.spacenews.com
April 8, 2013
Kazakhstan Approves More
Launches from Baikonur
Kazakhstan has agreed to raise the ceiling on Russian commercial launches this
year from the Baikonur Cosmodrome from
12 to 15, according to Kalamkas Temirova,
a spokeswoman for the Kazakh Space
Agency.
Russia originally sought permission for
17 commercial missions this year from
Baikonur, which is located in the central
Asian republic. Kazakhstan initially agreed
to 12, triggering a Russian diplomatic push
that industry sources say was driven in part
by a desire to provide more margin for its
commercial launch industry.
Several different Russian rockets operate from Baikonur, including the heavy-lift
Proton, a workhorse with a substantial commercial manifest. International Launch
Services (ILS), which markets the Proton
commercially, launched the Satmex 8 satellite from Baikonur in March, and that mission counts against the 15-launch ceiling,
according to Russian sources.
ILS has six more launches scheduled between now and August, part of a total Proton manifest of 12 missions for the remainder of the year, according to industry
sources.
White House Sets Sights on
Asteroid Capture Mission
The White House will ask Congress for
$105 million in 2014 to get started on a mission to capture an asteroid and return it to
a high lunar orbit, where it would be visited
in 2025 by astronauts launched aboard the
heavy-lift rocket being developed by NASA,
a U.S. government source said.
According to this source, who requested
anonymity to discuss the White House’s
2014 budget request in advance of its April
10 public unveiling, the proposed mission
will cost somewhere between $1 billion and
$2.6 billion over 11 years. The White House
is not seeking an increase to NASA’s budget for this mission, the source said.
The asteroid tug mission would be jointly funded and managed by NASA’s Science,
Human Exploration and Space Technology
mission directorates. The $105 million to
be requested in 2014 includes:
å $20 million for the Science Mission
Directorate to improve its asteroid detection technology.
å $40 million for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate
for early work on a robotic spacecraft capable of capturing an asteroid and hauling it
to lunar space.
å $45 million for the Space Technology
Mission Directorate for a solar electric
propulsion system to power the asteroidcapture spacecraft.
The robotic asteroid tug could launch as
soon as 2017 or 2018, the source said. NASA
has not decided which asteroid it wants to
target but has already identified a handful
of candidates, the government source said.
The mission NASA has decided to fund
is based on a study completed last year by
the Keck Institute for Space Studies, part of
the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena. That study examined the feasibility of hauling a 500-ton asteroid into lunar orbit.
The Keck study assumed that the aster-
oid capture vehicle would launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), a strong supporter of the heavy-lift Space Launch System that would carry astronauts to the
parked asteroid from a launchpad at the
Kennedy Space Center in Florida, praised
the proposed mission in an April 5 press
release.
“This is part of what will be a much
broader program,” Nelson said in the press
release. “The plan combines the science of
mining an asteroid, along with developing
ways to deflect one, along with providing a
place to develop ways we can go to Mars.”
NASA Selects Pair of
Astrophysics Missions
NASA has selected two small astrophysics missions for launch in 2017, the
agency announced April 5.
The selections are the latest in NASA’s
small explorer program line, a series of
competitively selected, cost-capped astrophysics missions. NASA picked one standalone mission, which will fly aboard a dedicated spacecraft, and one mission of
opportunity, which will be hosted aboard
the international space station.
The standalone mission is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS),
an exoplanet hunter similar to the Kepler telescope. The principal investigator
for the $200 million mission is George
Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
The hosted mission is an X-ray observatory called the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER. NICER will
observe superdense neutron stars from its
perch on the space station. The principal
investigator for the $55 million mission is
Keith Gendreau of NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Melco To Build Last Three
QZSS Navigation Satellites
Mitsubishi Electric Co. (Melco) of
Tokyo will lead a team to complete Japan’s
Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) to
enhance the precision of the U.S. GPS positioning, navigation and timing satellites
over the Pacific Ocean region under a
contract valued at $539.4 million, the Cabinet Office of the Japanese prime minister
announced.
The contract calls for Melco to build
one geostationary satellite and two spacecraft to be operated in highly elliptical orbit to complete the QZSS space architecture by 2017.
The contract is valued at nearly 50.3 billion Japanese yen, or $539.4 million at current exchange rates. A separate contract,
valued at 117.3 billion yen, will be signed
with a special-purpose company led by NEC
Corp. to operate the system, which combined with the lone QZSS satellite already
in orbit will comprise four satellites. The operational contract is for 15 years.
Japan’s first QZSS satellite was
launched in September 2010. The program slowed after that as it became clear
that Japan’s private sector was unwilling to
manage QZSS as a business without substantial government guarantees. The same
hesitation derailed Europe’s Galileo global navigation system before its financing
William A. Klanke is rejoining SpaceNews as president and publisher, with
responsibility for sales, new products
and strategic planning.
Klanke replaces Paul McPherson,
who left the company March 26.
Previously Klanke was vice president
and general manager at AOL Industry,
a group of online publications focusing
on the defense, government and energy markets.
Before joining AOL in March 2012,
Klanke spent 10 years as vice president
and general manager of the Virginiabased Space News Media Group, which
at the time was a division of Imaginova
Corp. SpaceNews, now a separate company with new ownership, experienced
strong growth across its product line
during Klanke’s tenure.
was made the sole responsibility of European Union governments.
Japan’s Secretariat of Strategic Headquarters for Space Policy, part of the government’s Cabinet, estimates that GPS-only
signals that are available with precision only
90 percent of the time in Japan will be available 99.8 percent of the time with the QZSS
overlay. QZSS will carry six civil signals.
The secretariat has told international
positioning, navigation and timing conferences in the past two years that the GPS-only
L1S signal has a 10-meter horizontal accuracy in Japan that will improve to 2 meters
with the addition of QZSS.
In addition to augmenting the mediumEarth-orbit GPS constellation of 24 operational satellites, QZSS will be able to send
short disaster-warning messages to anyone
with a mobile telephone.
India is planning a similar regional GPS
overlay of its own. In North America, the
GPS signals are verified by terminals placed
on commercial telecommunications satellites in geostationary orbit. A similar system
is operational in Europe, and Russia is planning one as well.
Russia’s Glonass and the U.S. GPS are
the only two global satellite navigation
systems in operation now, although China’s Beidou program has launched 14
spacecraft; that system is operational over
Chinese territory and will provide global
s e r v i c e w h e n c o m p l e t e d . E u r o p e ’s
Galileo is scheduled to enter global operations in 2014.
In its March 29 announcement, the Cabinet Office said Melco and NEC won the
contracts following a competitive bidding
process that ranked each bidder. Details of
the rankings will be published at a later
date, the office said.
Amid Declining U.S. Budgets,
Astrium Sees Opportunity
The U.S. military space budget is in for
a multiyear decline and NASA’s budget is
stagnant at best, leaving U.S. manufacturers
hungry for new markets — hardly the moment for a non-U.S. company to be looking
to grow in the United States.
Astrium Americas, a unit of Europe’s
EADS aerospace giant, does not share that
view. The company has created a new office in California to sell space propulsion
technologies.
The company has hired Robert Huebner, a former vice president at AMPAC InSpace Technologies of Niagara Falls, N.Y.,
to run the Los Angeles operation, whose
coals-to-Newcastle timing suits Astrium
just fine.
SPACENEWS PHOTO BY LANCE H. MARBURGER
NEWS BRIEFS
Klanke Back at SpaceNews as President and Publisher
William A. Klanke
“The market is challenging now with
government budget cuts and the fact that
prime contractors are looking to the commercial market as a kind of alternative,”
said Andreas Rohne, head of the in-space
propulsion business at Astrium Space
Transportation. “But this presents opportunities as well. There are new platforms being developed, and we already have many
relations with U.S. suppliers that can be better managed from the U.S.”
Astrium’s Eurostar commercial telecommunications satellite platform uses an established U.S. supply chain. In addition to
hunting for new business, the propulsion
office will maintain closer relations with
these suppliers.
“The main point is to be in the United
States,” Rohne said April 3. “We will take
our time there.”
Astrium in the past couple of years has
created a separate business unit, called Astrium Satellite Products, to sell satellite
equipment to prime contractors to diversify the revenue base beyond the company’s
satellites.
Thomas Mueller, head of Astrium Satellite Products, said the company sees multiple opportunities for expanding its business in the United States, saying the budget
crisis may shake up the U.S. industrial base
to the point where new partnerships are
possible.
“It’s not just propulsion, but general
satellite equipment where we may be able
to add value” to U.S. prime contractors on
government and nongovernment programs, Mueller said.
SEE NEWS BRIEFS PAGE 8
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4
April 8, 2013
European Laser Comm System Draws Bead on U.S. Military Market
>
For Astrium Services, which is developing the European Data Relay Service in partnership with the 20-nation European Space Agency, the push to attract U.S.
military interest will include laser-communications tests between a satellite and a ground station installed on Mount Wilson in California.
nang, Germany, with funding
from the German Aerospace
Center, DLR, the laser communications terminals have already been well-tested in transmissions between the U.S.
M i s s i l e D e f e n s e A g e n c y ’s
NFIRE satellite and Germany’s
TerraSAR-X radar Earth observation satellite.
Since 2012, the system has
been tested using a Falcon business jet.
Optical transmissions are
less easy to disrupt or jam than
radio frequency signals, and
they do not need to be coordinated with international regula-
ASIASAT FROM PAGE 1
relevant intellectual property rights issues. In an April 4 interview, Jensen
said the sounder instrument to be integrated onto the AsiaSat satellite is
the size of a refrigerator and weighs
300 kilograms. It will consume 500
watts of power.
‘Playing the Field’
Crain said GMW approached several
commercial satellite operators about the
commercial weather service, but that all
wanted an up-front payment from GMW
and then a fixed annual payment over
the project’s life. AsiaSat, he said, has
treated the transaction as a partnership
and has agreed that its revenue share, after the $185 million is reimbursed, will
be a percentage of what is generated by
the instrument.
“We were playing the field until late
last year, when AsiaSat told us they were
seriously interested, and we signed an
exclusivity agreement with them in December,” Crain said. “AsiaSat has really
taken a leap of faith with this.” About the
convertible note, he said: “I’m not worried about it.”
AsiaSat Chief Executive William
tors at the International
Telecommunication Union.
ESA and the European Commission plan to use EDRS to relay environmental data from
low-orbiting observation satellites to geostationary-orbit satellites for faster delivery to
ground users.
Europe’s Sentinel 1A and
Sentinel 1B environment-monitoring satellites, scheduled for
launch by 2014, will both be
equipped with laser communications terminals, as will the
large Alphasat multimission
spacecraft scheduled for launch
this summer into geostationary
Wade, in an April 3 statement, said:
“We are excited to take part in this
groundbreaking project that will provide advanced data to improve weather
forecasting, natural disaster monitoring and climate modeling. This new
partnership with GeoMetWatch will
open up new opportunities to expand
our satellite services into new areas,
and allow us to explore a new source of
revenue.”
GMW’s longer-term business plan is
to place six sounding instruments on six
geostationary-orbiting telecommunications satellites as hosted payloads. Once
the service begins generating revenue
on the AsiaSat satellite, the Hong Kongbased special-purpose company created
by GMW will be able to apply to the U.S.
Export-Import Bank for a low-interest
loan to help finance the other five sensors, he said.
The first hyperspectral sounder is under construction at Utah State’s Advanced Weather Systems laboratory in
Logan, Utah. Expertise in developing
the sensor’s algorithms and data-processing capacity has come in part from
the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center, GMW
said in a statement. Jensen said the Utah
orbit. Mobile satellite services
provider Inmarsat of London
will use Alphasat’s L-band payload for Inmarsat’s commercial
business, but the spacecraft includes several ESA-funded technology demonstration payloads, including a laser
terminal.
Transmission speeds of 1.8
gigabits per second are expected for the links between low-orbiting and high-orbiting satellites. The transmission between
NFIRE and TerraSAR-X, both in
low Earth orbit, was triple that
speed.
Two further geostationary
ASIASAT PHOTO
Europe’s satellite data-relay
system, which is targeting the
U.S. Defense Department as a
major prospective customer, is
accelerating deployment this
year with the launch of satellites
carrying laser terminals to low
Earth orbit and to geostationary
orbit.
For Astrium Services, which
is developing the European
Data Relay Service (EDRS) in
partnership with the 20-nation
European Space Agency (ESA),
the push to attract U.S. military
interest will include laser-communications tests between a
satellite and a ground station
installed on Mount Wilson in
California.
Astrium has already tested
satellite-to-ground links at
ESA’s Optical Ground System in
Spain’s Canar y Islands. But
nothing beats tests conducted
in the backyard of a customer
like the U.S. Defense Department, said Ako Hegyi, EDRS
program manager at Astrium
Services.
“It’s always good to be close
to potential stakeholders,”
Hegyi said in an April 5 interview explaining why the
Mount Wilson campaign was
needed on the back of the Canar y Islands tests. “And the
fact is that the laser terminals
were not initially made for leoto-ground links or geo-tog r o u n d l i n k s . We a r e n o w
looking at adaptive optics to
improve” the reliability of
transmissions between low-orbiting and geostationary-orbiting satellites, and between
these satellites and the
ground.
Developed by Tesat of Back-
EADS ARTIST'S CONCEPT
William Wade
facility is large enough to handle the
manufacture of all six instruments.
In its Hong Kong Stock Exchange
satellites with laser terminals
are under construction. A Eutelsat telecommunications
satellite planned for launch
late this year or early in 2014
will be located at 9 degrees
east, and a telecommunications satellite to be used by
Av a n t i C o m m u n i c a t i o n s o f
London at 31 degrees east is
scheduled for launch in mid2014.
“With these two satellites we
can provide near-global coverage to low-orbiting satellites
because the elevation angle we
need is very low,” Hegyi said.
For airborne applications —
aircraft or unmanned aerial
vehicles — the coverage
stretches from the extreme
northeast of North America
across Europe, Central Asia,
South Asia and to most of East
Asia. The service is promising
direct data delivery to any
NATO or coalition teleport in
Europe.
Astrium Services, with its sister company Astrium Satellites,
is looking for other opportunities among commercial satellite
operators to place a laser terminal on a satellite over North
America to afford full global
coverage.
Astrium Services is pitching
the service to the U.S. military
as a possible partnership in
which the customer would provide a launch in return for access to data. The company is
also pursuing a cooperation
arrangement with MDA Corp.
of Canada, and the Canadian
government, which recently began full construction of the
three-satellite Radar Constellation Mission.
Comments: __________
pdeselding@gmail.com
filing, AsiaSat said the GMW sounder
will return data on atmospheric temperature, humidity, winds and chemistry “with far greater precision and accuracy than current systems, and at
much higher speed,” especially for
storm forecasts.
AsiaSat said GMW is the only company
with a U.S. Department of Commerce Remote Atmospheric Sensing License to use
hyperspectral sounder technology in geostationary orbit.
Crain said GMW has been granted a
Technical Assistance Agreement by
the U.S. State Department to discuss
the project with AsiaSat. He said that
the technology in question is covered
under U.S. International Traffic in
Arms Regulations (ITAR), meaning
GMW faces a potentially laborious
process to win final approval for any
export.
Hosting the GMW payload means
AsiaSat, which has not yet ordered the
satellite in question, will be limited to
U.S., European and Japanese manufacturers, and U.S., European or Russian
launch service providers because of
ITAR constraints.
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SPACE SOLUTIONS
DELIVERING A MORE
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of Raytheon Company. Image credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison SSEC/CIMSS.
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6
April 8, 2013
Boeing Phantom Works Designs New Small-satellite Offering
DAN LEONE, WASHINGTON
Boeing Phantom Works, the research arm of the U.S. aerospace
giant’s sprawling defense business,
is introducing a new line of smallsatellite platforms featuring common avionics and software in
hopes of tapping what company officials see as a multibillion-dollar
market in the years ahead.
The Phantom Phoenix line of
platforms would range anywhere
from several to 1,000 kilograms in
weight and could be adapted for
short-term experiments or operational missions lasting up to seven
years or more, said Bruce Chesley, director of advanced space and intelligence systems at Phantom works.
The demand Boeing sees is
mostly within the U.S. Defense Department and intelligence agencies. The company also is betting
that the so-called disaggregation of
space, whereby big multimission
satellites are replaced by constellations of smaller, cheaper spacecraft, becomes a reality.
“We can project markets in 10,
maybe 15 years that are in the double-digit billions of dollars,” Darryl
Davis, president of St. Louis-based
Phantom Works, said in an April 2
interview. “That’s what drives us to
do this.
“You have to take some risk in
trying to look at where the markets are going, and we see them
going here. If you look at what’s
happening with the defense agencies’ and the three-letter agencies’
budgets, they can’t necessarily afford these multibillion-dollar
satellites anymore.”
The company also sees a commercial market, where a number
of entrepreneurial satellite-based
ventures for services such as imaging and data relay have sprung up
in recent years.
Phantom Works officials envi-
sion the Phantom Phoenix spacecraft line to open up applications
that might not have even been considered in the past. They drew comparisons to the 702SP operational
satellite platform recently introduced by Boeing Satellite Systems,
which features an all-electric
propulsion system to enable missions that normally require a satellite twice its size and weight.
While Boeing is not known as a
maker of small satellites, its divisions have built a number of small
experimental platforms for the De-
fense Department, including the
Orbital Express satellite servicing
demonstration. While Phantom
Works plans to leverage this and
other small-satellite work, the real
key to Phoenix is the common
avionics and software package, developed with internal research and
development funding, which company officials say is compatible with
a wide variety of off-the-shelf hardware components in any number
of configurations.
“It’s an architecture,” said Alejandro Lopez, vice president of ad-
vanced network and space systems
for Phantom Works. “Think about it
as a computer: There’s peripheral
components you can acquire from
the market place, cheaply, then
there’s the way you build it ... how
you actually integrate and test.”
Done correctly, Lopez said, the
Phantom Phoenix method would
“break the cost curve and allow
these satellites to be built incredibly affordable, every time.”
Phantom Works has built some
hardware prototypes, but Phantom Phoenix is still in an early de-
Boeing Exec Says Sequestration May Force Contract Changes
WARREN FERSTER, WASHINGTON
The across-the-board budget cuts known
as sequestration could force the U.S. Air
Force to renegotiate some of its fixed-price
satellite manufacturing contracts unless the
service can find a way to restore the funding,
according to a senior industry official.
Roger A. Krone, president of Boeing Network and Space Systems of Seal Beach, Calif.,
emphasized that his company has received
no direction from the Air Force and that his
preference is to not have to reopen existing
contracts. But it might nonetheless be necessary if programs being managed under
fixed-price contracts are forced to absorb an
8 percent budget cut, which is roughly their
proportionate share of sequestration’s 2013
bite out of Pentagon spending.
Because of their complexity, government
satellite programs typically are managed under so-called cost-plus contracts, whereby the
customer bears most of the risk of cost
growth. But when a program moves into a
repetitive production phase, the government often moves to fixed-price arrangements that are typical of commercial satellite
contracts, whereby the manufacturer is responsible for covering any cost overruns.
Krone said cost-plus arrangements provide the customer with more flexibility to
change various contract terms, such as
stretching out the production schedule,
which drives up costs. Fixed-price contracts
offer less flexibility in this regard, he said.
Boeing, which is very active in the commercial satellite sector, is prime contractor on
a number of government programs that are
under fixed-price arrangements. These include the Air Force’s Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) communications satellite system, the GPS 2F navigation constellation,
and some classified programs, Krone said in
an interview.
“We came to agreement on these fixedprice contracts and that was a mutual agreement — we came to the table, we negotiated,
we got to an agreement that we like and the
customer likes,” Krone said. “We would prefer to continue with the fixed-price contracts
as they stand. If they slow down production
of WGS, our costs will go up. It’s inevitable.”
Krone was wary of prescribing measures
the Pentagon might take to avoid having to
reopen contracts, but he acknowledged that
a reprogramming of funds is a likely option.
A reprogramming — drawing funds appropriated for one program in a given year and
applying them to another — of the scale required to shore up a major satellite production program likely would require congressional approval.
“It’s a very complicated budget process,”
Krone said. “The bigger muscle movement
you have, the more discussion you’re going
to have to have with Congress.”
Krone nonetheless expressed confidence
that the Pentagon will find a way to offset sequestration’s cuts on Boeing’s fixed-price
space contracts.
“We are not looking to reopen the fixedprice contracts,” Krone said. “We are hopeful and optimistic that the customer will find
a way to maintain funding on those contracts
so that they don’t have to be reopened.”
The WGS program has five satellites in
various stages of construction but a 2013
budget of only $37 million, which may be related to the fact that the program has a number of international partners who are contributing roughly $1 billion combined in
velopment phase. The company is
talking with prospective customers
but has yet to land any firm orders,
officials said.
If the product catches on, it
would be transferred to Boeing
Satellite Systems of El Segundo,
Calif., for marketing and production in accordance with the operating model of Phantom Works,
whose divisions feed technology directly into corresponding manufacturing divisions of the parent
company.
But even if Phantom Works succeeds in demonstrating it has truly
developed a low-cost, versatile
small-satellite platform, Phoenix
faces tough market barriers. For
one thing, not everyone agrees
with Davis’ assessment of the size of
the potential market.
“Estimating a government market with so many unknowns that far
into the future — you’re really
guessing,” said Marco Caceres, senior analyst and director of space
studies for the Teal Group Corp., a
market research firm in Fairfax,
Va. “Almost every study that looks
that far into the future is really
guess work.”
Another major hurdle is the
lack of low-cost launch opportunities for satellites in the Phantom
Phoenix weight range. One option
cited by company officials is the
adapter ring that enables the U.S.
Air Force’s workhorse Atlas 5 and
Delta 4 rockets to accommodate
multiple secondary payloads, but
actual flights of that hardware have
been few and far between since its
introduction several years ago.
Davis suggested there are more
launch opportunities available
than meets the eye, but declined to
be specific. Phantom Works officials also cited new commercial vehicles entering the market, such as
Space Exploration Technologies
Corp.’s medium-class Falcon 9.
exchange for access to the 10-satellite constellation. If that is the case, sequestration’s
cut to the Air Force portion of the funding,
about $3.3 million, would be substantially less
than actual contract outlays in 2013.
Lorenzo R. Cortes, a spokesman for Boeing, referred questions regarding the status
of the WGS program to the Air Force.
The Air Force Space and Missile Systems
Center in Los Angeles, which buys satellites
and rockets on behalf of the service, did not
respond by press time to a request for clarification of WGS.
In a separate interview, Richard F. Ambrose, executive vice president of Denverbased Lockheed Martin Space Systems, said
his company, like Boeing, has yet to receive
any guidance from the Pentagon on sequestration impacts. Lockheed Martin is the Air
Force’s biggest space contractor, and most its
contracts are cost-plus arrangements.
Among Lockheed Martin’s big Air Force
space programs are the Advanced Extremely High Frequency secure communications
satellites, the Space Based Infrared System
for missile warning, and the next-generation
GPS 3 satellite navigation system.
Ambrose said sequestration’s cuts could
potentially force the Air Force to stretch out
some programs.
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8
April 8, 2013
NEWS BRIEFS FROM PAGE 3
Russia Poised To Launch
1st Bion Mission in 15 Years
The Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos,
will launch a satellite carrying biological
experiments April 19 from the Baikonur
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Bion-M mission will launch aboard
a Soyuz rocket and spend 30 days in orbit,
carrying lab mice, geckos and other creatures, Vladimir Sychev, the mission’s research supervisor, said.
The mission is resuming the Russian
biosatellite program after a 15-year hiatus.
Researchers from NASA and several U.S.
universities will have access to the experiments once they return to Earth. Experiments on mice aim to determine how life
adapts to zero gravity, research applicable
to long-duration human spaceflight.
The spacecraft will also have an outboard attachment of basalt rocks containing bacteria in a test of whether these cells
will survive the heat of atmospheric re-entry. If they do, it will support the idea that
living organisms could come to Earth on
the back of a meteorite, Sychev said.
Globalstar Wins 2-week
Reprieve from Creditors
Mobile satellite services provider Globalstar on April 1 announced it had won a
two-week reprieve from holders of some
$70.7 million in notes callable on April 1
and was working to secure a wider debt-restructuring agreement with the French export-credit agency, Coface, by the new
deadline of April 15.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission, Covington, La.based Globalstar cautioned that there is
no guarantee of a settlement with Coface,
and that the company is exploring other
refinancing options as well.
Some $71.8 million in Globalstar notes
paying interest of 5.75 percent per year
were callable on April 1. The company said
it had been informed that owners of more
than 98 percent of notes intended to present them for payment on April 1.
Globalstar does not have the cash to
pay these creditors and would have faced a
default event on its Coface-backed facility
if the note holders had not agreed to an
extension.
Globalstar said that in return for the
two-week extension on the part of these
note holders, the company has agreed to
pay legal costs associated with the transaction through April 1.
Globalstar operates a fleet of 24 new
second-generation satellites in low Earth
orbit, plus its older satellites. With the
launch of the final six-satellite group of
second-generation spacecraft in February,
the company has been trying to rebuild its
customer base for voice calls, the most
profitable of its service offerings.
Voice services degraded starting in
2007 following failures on the first-generation Globalstar spacecraft, and the company has kept the business going by diversifying into data-related services including
Shenzhou 10 Capsule
Arrives at Launch Site
The space capsule for China’s Shenzhou 10 mission, which could blast off as
early as June with three astronauts
aboard, has arrived at the launch site in
t h e c o u n t r y ’s n o r t h w e s t e r n G a n s u
Province.
It was delivered March 31 to the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the spacecraft’s state-owned manufacturer China
Aerospace Science and Technology Corp.
announced April 1. All four of China’s previous manned spaceflights have launched
from Jiuquan.
Still in the factory and undergoing final
testing is the Long March 2F rocket slated
to carry the astronauts on a mission to rendezvous with the currently unmanned
Tiangong 1 space station, the company
statement said.
“The launch site facilities and equipment are in good condition,” China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. said
in a statement. “All preparation work is being carried out as planned.”
Shenzhou 10 is expected to be a 15-day
mission, with astronauts spending 12 days
inside the space lab. It is scheduled to be
the second and final manned mission to
Tiangong 1.
Last June, three astronauts aboard the
Shenzhou 9 spent 13 days in space. The
mission to the Tiangong 1 featured China’s first manual space station docking
and its first woman in space, Liu Yang.
The next woman astronaut is likely to
be an army captain named Wang Yaping,
the state-run Beijing Times reported April 1.
Wang was a candidate last year for Shenzhou 9 but lost out to Liu.
NASA SCREEN GRAB
NEWS BRIEFS
its popular SPOT Messenger service to the
consumer market.
Globalstar had hoped to win Coface approval for additional financial backing in
support of the construction and launch of
six more second-generation satellites. But
Globalstar Chief Executive Jay Monroe
said recently that an upgraded Globalstar
ground network would remove the need
for these additional spacecraft.
A scene from NASA’s “We Are the Explorers” video
VIRGIN GALACTIC PHOTO BY MARK GREENBERG
AIA Crowdfunding Effort Taking NASA Ad to Cineplex
Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo fly above Spaceport America in New Mexico
New Mexico Expands Spaceflight Liability Law
New Mexico Gov. Susan Martinez
on April 2 signed into law the New
Mexico Expanded Space Flight Informed Consent Act in a ceremony at
Spaceport America in the southern
part of the state.
The bill extends the state’s existing
commercial spaceflight liability indemnification to suppliers of companies who operate such vehicles.
After a previous effort to extend
that protection died in the legislature
last year, Virgin Galactic, the anchor
tenant for Spaceport America, sug-
gested it might move elsewhere if the
liability law was not updated.
Spaceport supporters said the
state’s trial lawyers association, who
previously had opposed such legislation, worked out a compromise that
breezed through the state legislature.
“With this legislation in place,
Spaceport America will continue to become one of our nation’s hubs for
commercial spaceflight,” Michael
Lopez-Alegria, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said in
a statement.
The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), an Arlington, Va.-based lobbying organization, has raised more
than $42,000 to help place a NASA advertisement in 59 movie theaters for
eight weeks across the United States.
The NASA video ad will run before
“Star Trek Into Darkness” — the next
chapter in the rebooted “Star Trek”
franchise — when it debuts May 17.
After setting up a campaign March
26 on the crowdfunding website __
In_________
dieGoGo.com, officials from the AIA
met their initial $33,000 goal in six
days with the help of more than 1,000
backers.
“By backing this 30-second trailer in
the top movie theater markets around
the United States, you can show our students and young people that we’re in
an exciting new era of space exploration,” officials from the AIA wrote on
the campaign page. “Now is the time to
reach them — to remind them that an
inspiring space program awaits, one
that is worthy of their ambition.”
The 30-second spot will be a cutdown version of a 2.5-minute video
called “We are the Explorers” produced by NASA last year. Narrated by
Peter Cullen — the voice of Optimus
Prime in the “Transformers” movie series — the video details the past and
possible future of the space agency.
“Right now men and women are
working on the next steps to go farther
than we have ever gone before,”
Cullen said in his narration. “New vessels will carry us, and new destinations
await us.”
This campaign comes on the heels
of a March 22 announcement that
NASA outreach activities will be scaled
back because of sequestration. Due to
the series of across-the-board budget
cuts that took effect March 1, NASA officials have suspended many of the
agency’s public outreach programs in
place to get children and adults involved in the space program.
The AIA seems to be trying to pick
up where NASA left off. Officials with
the space agency are not legally allowed
to use NASA funds to buy advertisement time, but the AIA, as a private organization, is under no such obligation.
“By funding this campaign, we can
remind students and the general public
that our nation’s space agency is working hard on the next era of exploration,” AIA officials wrote in the campaign statement. “Keeping the public
informed of NASA’s activities is a key element of sustaining the health of our
space program.”
While the campaign has met its initial goal, AIA officials have set a new
funding goal they hope to reach before
the end of the month. If the campaign
raises $94,000 or more, the NASA advertisement will be placed in 750 theaters in the United States.
AIA’s IndieGoGo campaign is accepting donations until May 1.
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April 8, 2013
NEWS BRIEFS
Satellite Imagery To Star
In Imax, Disney Feature
IMAX, the large-format film
company, has announced it will
again launch moviegoers into
outer space, this time in a 3-D feature to be produced with the Walt
Disney Studios.
The still-to-be-titled film will be
the eighth time IMAX has pointed
its cameras and screens toward
space in a movie led by filmmaker
Toni Myers. According to the
company, the production will use
“high-resolution photography
and videography to offer breathtaking, illuminating views of our
home planet from space” to explore the changes that have occurred on Earth in just the past
several decades.
Targeted for a 2015 release
and made in cooperation with
NASA, the film will focus on humankind's future on — and off —
the planet, “increasing our understanding of the solar system,”
while also virtually traveling lightyears to other star systems to ponder the possibilities of Goldilocks,
the term planetary scientists give
to planets that fall inside a star’s
habitable zone, like Earth.
The space film will mark the
first time that IMAX and the Walt
Disney Studios have jointly produced a film together. The companies previously collaborated on
the distribution of movies.
“Disney has always been a
leader in creating immersive fantasy worlds for audiences, but we
know there's no more immersive
world than the real one,” said Alan
Bergman, president of the Walt
Disney Studios. “This is a bird’s eye
view of our incredible universe
and our future in it, and we are
looking forward to diving in.”
“We are thrilled to collaborate
on our first joint production with
Disney,” said Greg Foster, chairman and president of IMAX Entertainment. “Toni Myers and her
team have given us films that have
been educating, delighting and astonishing IMAX audiences for
many years, and we look forward
to continuing the journey.”
Myers has been editing, writing,
producing and directing films
specifically tailored for IMAX since
1971. Her most recent documentary feature and seventh space film
was “Hubble 3D.” The movie,
which chronicled the final space
shuttle mission to upgrade the
Hubble Space Telescope, has
grossed nearly $53 million in IMAX
theaters since its release in 2010.
“The 1990 IMAX film ‘Blue
Planet’ was the first time we pointed
the IMAX cameras from space back
to Earth to reveal, on a grand scale,
the changes being made to our
planet by both natural and human
forces,” Myers said. “It’s marvelous
and important to have this new opportunity to show what has happened to our planet since then.”
“The international space station is a unique and perfect platform from which to see how our
home is evolving,” she added,
“and at the same time explore our
exciting future in other worlds.”
In addition to “Blue Planet”
and “Hubble 3D,” Myers’ space titles include “Hail Columbia”
(1982), “The Dream is Alive”
(1985), “Destiny in Space”
(1994), “Mission to Mir” (1997)
and “Space Station 3D”(2002),
IMAX’s first film to include 3-D
footage shot by NASA astronauts
using its cameras in space.
CLS Building Indonesian
Oceanography Center
Satellite-based environmental
data collection and positioning
service provider CLS of France will
build an oceanography center for
the government of Indonesia under a contract valued at $30 million,
Toulouse, France-based CLS said.
CLS, which is partly owned by
the French space agency, CNES,
and by France’s IFREMER
oceanography institute, will deliver
the center in 2014. It will include a
satellite image-reception center for
high-resolution radar data and a
research and surveillance facility.
CLS said one of the main goals
of the center is to reduce illegal
fishing in Indonesian territorial
waters, an activity CLS said deprives Indonesia and its fishermen
of some $2 billion in annual revenue. Of special concern is illegal
tuna fishing.
CLS said it has already installed
3,000 Indonesian commercial
fishing vessels with satellite-based
location devices since 2004 as part
of Indonesia’s effort to manage its
fishing stocks.
CLS has 475 employees and reported sales of 79 million euros
($103 million) in 2012. The company is perhaps best known for its
Argos network of 21,000 buoys
and transmitters placed on
wildlife that send data to satellites.
Smarter approaches.
Better results.
At a.i. solutions, we are passionate about taking
smarter approaches to reach better solutions for
our customers. As a trusted space industry partner,
we deliver what we promise: superior results.
Core Capabilities
Visit a.i. solutions at Booth #304 during
the National Space Symposium!
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ai-solutions.com
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April 8, 2013
Latin American Sat Operators: No Lack of Demand for Capacity
Latin American satellite operators agree that their region’s
bull market in satellite bandwidth has plenty of life left and is
unlikely to be stopped by new
commercial and government capacity about to be launched.
In a unanimous show of optimism here during the Satellite
2013 conference last month,
these companies said the increased capacity will be snapped
up for consumer broadband applications and for the continued
demand for satellite television.
High-definition television,
which has substantial room to
grow, will only add to the demand
for satellite capacity.
Topping it all off, they said, is
new legislation working its way
through the Mexican government that will remove the constraints to establishing satellite
operations there.
“The legislation increases the
ownership a foreign [satellite]
provider may have without needing a local partner,” said Carmen
Gonzalez-Sanfeliu, Latin American vice president for satellite
fleet operator Intelsat of Luxembourg and Washington. “There is
basically no need to set up a joint
venture with a Mexican partner.
This is unbelievable for Mexico.”
Javier Recio, vice president of
Mexican satellite operator Satmex, agreed that the Mexican
government “is taking a signifi-
INTELSAT PHOTO
PETER B. de SELDING,
WASHINGTON
Carmen Gonzalez-Sanfeliu
cant step” that will boost competition in Mexico. Recio noted
that almost all of the big satellite
bandwidth providers in Latin
America, whether they be headquartered there or based in
North America or Europe, are
privately owned.
Many of the satellite operators
active in the region — Star One
of Brazil, Hispasat of Spain, Telesat of Canada and SES of Luxembourg as well as Intelsat and Satmex — are adding new satellite
capacity over the region.
Added to this, governments in
Mexico and Brazil are planning
new satellite systems, mainly for
government use but with some applications that appear to overlap
with what is already offered by the
private sector. Venezuela has its
own government telecommunications satellite. Bolivia, Colombia
and the Andean group of nations
are in various stages of development of their own systems.
But at least so far, the government satellites launched have not
dampened demand for commercial capacity even though many
Latin American governments
have insisted that foreign satellite
operators follow landing rights
rules that are “among the most
complicated in the world,” said
Dolores Martos, SES vice president for Latin America and the
Caribbean.
“Some countries decided to
go on their own for satellite capacity and the private sector
thought this would take demand,
but this has not happened,” Martos said. “These government systems have had no effect on the
market.”
The Brazilian government is
currently running an international bidding competition for
two satellites carrying X- and Kaband. Brazil’s commercial fleet
operator, Star One, has its own
plans in Ka-band, but Star One
General Director Lincoln
Oliveira said the government initiative could be an opportunity
for his company.
“The current government procurement is mainly for government use,” Oliveira said. “Yes,
some of our potential Ka-band
market could be affected, but it
could also be an opportunity for
us to complement the government [Ka-band] network.”
Oliveira, whose Star One C3
satellite was launched in late
2012, said Star One C4 will be
launched in mid-2014. The company is preparing a bid request
for another spacecraft, to be
launched in 2015.
Hispasat of Spain is planning
the region’s first major supply of
Ka-band with the Amazonas 3
satellite, which recently entered
service. In addition to its C- and
Ku-band capacity, the satellite has
nine Ka-band spot beams. A major telecommunications network
operator has recently purchased
part of this capacity for a Ka-band
consumer broadband service,
said Ignacio Sanchis, chief business officer for Hispasat.
But the promise of Ka-band
still pales when compared with
the reality of current demand
for direct-broadcast satellite
television.
“The fill rates on the satellites
[over Latin America] are 80-90
percent, so there is no oversupply of immediate concern,” Sanchis said. “Yes, there are new
satellites coming, but demand is
set to grow enormously over the
next decade. There will be 400500 new transponders needed in
the region to keep up with the
demand in the coming years, according to some forecasts.”
Martos of SES said many of
the new satellites about to be
launched are to replace existing
capacity, while others are pure
market-growth plays.
“We added 500 [megahertz]
in 2012 and it is totally sold out.
Our SES-6 satellite planned for
launch in 2013, with 36 Ku-band
transponders, is also sold out,”
Martos said.
Recio of Satmex said his company still has capacity available
on the just-launched Satmex 8,
which will take over from the
Satmex 5 satellite nearing retirement but is much larger than
Satmex 5.
“I don’t think there will be an
oversupply situation in the region,” Recio said. “It is a cyclical
industry, but the operators are
now showing fill rates above 80
percent, and in our case it is in
the 90s. The new capacity will offer a breather to what is now being charged right now.”
Satmex 8 adds 40-45 percent
more Ku-band capacity compared with the Satmex 5 satellite
it is replacing. One-half of this
additional capacity has already
been sold, “so we have 20-25 percent of added Ku-band that is
available in addition to the Satmex 5 customers that will be
transferred,” Recio said.
Perhaps the surest sign that an
oversupply is not on the near
horizon is that customers are still
grumbling about prices.
“I don’t sell satellite capacity, I
buy it,” said Sergio Murillo, director of satellite ser vices
provider Red 52 of Mexico. “And
each time I ask for more bandwidth, the prices have gone up.
This to me is not an indication of
oversupply. In fact, we sometimes
have trouble finding the capacity
that we need.”
Satellite fleet operator Intelsat Global
moved forward April 2 with its longplanned initial public offering (IPO) of
stock in a transaction valued at up to
$823 million if its underwriters are able
to sell their maximum allotments.
The company also said it expects its
revenue for the three months ending
March 30 to fall to between $645 million
and $660 million. The lower figure would
mean zero growth from the same period a
year ago. The upper figure would represent a 2 percent increase.
Luxembourg- and Washington-based
Intelsat is selling more than 21.739 million common shares at up to $25 per
share, plus 3 million convertible preferred shares at $50 apiece, the company
said in a prospectus filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC).
Its underwriters — Goldman Sachs, JP
Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Bank of
America Merrill Lynch — have the option, good for 30 days, of selling an additional 3.26 million common shares and
450,000 preferred shares if market demand exceeds the initial quantity.
The shares will be traded on the New
York Stock Exchange.
Intelsat is the world’s largest commercial satellite fleet operator by revenue, just
ahead of SES of Luxembourg, and has a
fleet of 54 satellites that cover just about
every region of the globe. The secondand third-largest fleet operators, SES and
Eutelsat of Paris, respectively, are both
publicly traded on European stock exchanges.
Intelsat’s revenue growth has slowed in
recent years, and following a series of purchases and sales by private-equity owners
the company is now carrying nearly $16
billion in debt. The company reported
$2.6 billion in revenue in 2012, with a
backlog of $10.7 billion as of Dec. 31.
Intelsat said in its prospectus that 5
percent of its revenue in 2012 came from
new business, compared with 6 percent in
2011 and 2010, 8 percent in 2009 and 7
percent in 2008.
The U.S. government, mainly the
Defense Department, accounted for 20
percent of Intelsat’s 2012 revenue but was
only 7 percent of the company’s backlog
as of Dec. 31. This is more a reflection of
the U.S. military’s aversion to long-term
bandwidth-purchase commitments than
an impending drop in military demand.
The company said it had $194.1 million in orbital-incentive payments outstanding as of Dec. 31. Commercial fleet
operators often withhold from satellite
builders about 10 percent of the agreed
price, paying it out with interest over the
satellite’s 15-year life. Payments cease or
BOEING PHOTO
Intelsat Moves Forward with $800 Million Initial Public Offering
IS-27 during construction
are reduced in the event of a major in-orbit failure.
It has told investors it will use the IPO’s
proceeds to reduce its debt and to make a
one-time payment to its current private-equity owners to end the annual $25 million
in consulting fees its owners have demand-
ed. The company said $39.1 million in IPO
revenue would be used to terminate the
consulting-fee obligation.
The company’s cash position has recently improved following a launch failure of the heavily insured Intelsat IS-27
satellite earlier this year. The satellite included UHF-band capacity for a military
customer that never materialized. Intelsat
has said the replacement satellite to be ordered will not have UHF, enabling the
company to pocket the large share of the
$406 million insurance claim that will not
be needed for the replacement.
Intelsat has three satellites under construction and scheduled for launch between late 2013 and late 2014. Two more
satellites are expected to be ordered in
short order. The first would replace the
non-UHF payload on IS-27, and the second would be IS-33e, the second of Intelsat’s Epic spacecraft offering highthroughput capacity in C- and Ku-bands.
The company said its current fleet of
54 satellites — including 11 in inclined orbit, a fuel-saving measure used for satellites nearing the end of their service lives
— is likely to shrink in the coming years.
As of Dec. 31, Intelsat operated 1,200 Cband transponders and 900 Ku-band
transponders. The combined fleet was 78
percent utilized at that time.
Comments: pdeselding@gmail.com
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The Space Launch System (SLS) is the
cornerstone of America’s future in space,
enabling a new age of discovery in deep
space. In partnership with NASA,
Boeing is leveraging its expertise and
proven advanced technologies that are
vital to ensuring SLS is safe, reliable
and affordable. To learn more, visit
www.beyondearth.com
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12
April 8, 2013
Europe Moves Out Tentatively on Space Situational Awareness
>
FRENCH SOCIALIST PARTY PHOTO
The European Space Agency
(ESA) inaugurated a space weather center April 3 as a visible signal
of its determination to move forward on a space situational awareness (SSA) program even as its
two largest members, France and
Germany, embark on a related
but separate bilateral effort.
These two nations, wary of the
military implications of space surveillance and tracking of satellites, will pursue a program whose
ultimate goal is not clear beyond
the common use of existing
French and German satellitetracking radars.
Germany has nonetheless
agreed to take part in the two lesssensitive SSA components, space
weather forecasting and the identification of potentially dangerous near-Earth objects.
French Research Minister
Genevieve Fioraso told the French
parliament March 26 that France’s
SSA work, mainly the Graves bistatic radar, was built with French
military investment and that keeping it a dual-use effort “is extremely important.” Fioraso said the
work with Germany would be conducted outside of ESA.
An official with the German
aerospace center, DLR, confirmed April 2 that the two na-
said during the April 3 inauguration of the Space Weather Coordination Center in Brussels that
the lack of strong signals from the
European Commission means
that ESA will have charge of space
weather activities for at least the
coming few years.
With Europe’s two biggest
space powers largely on the sidelines, ESA struggled to win support for its SSA program at last
November’s meeting of its member governments. What was originally intended as a program valued at 300 million euros ($400
million) over three years was
scaled back to 75.5 million euros,
and the agency secured only 46.5
million euros in firm commitments for the three years ending
in 2016.
Fourteen nations, including
Germany for two of the three
program elements, agreed to
contribute.
Most of the approved program
will be devoted to space weather
forecasting, which is still a young
science viewed as having direct
applications to the health of critical infrastructure including power plants, electrical lines, orbiting
satellites and even commercial
aircraft routes.
In a presentation during the
center’s inauguration, ESA’s space
weather activities director, JuhaPekka Luntama, said the so-called
Halloween storms of October-November 2003, caused by a two-week
spurt of solar activity, disrupted
multiple satellites and ground installations for about two weeks.
Satellites whose functions
were compromised include ESA’s
Mars Express orbiter, whose star
trackers were blinded by particle
radiation during the storms;
ESA’s Smart-1 lunar orbiter,
whose solar panels were damaged; NASA’s Mars Odyssey satellite, which was forced into safe
mode during the radiation storm
and suffered memory loss; and
the U.S. Defense Department’s
DMSP F16 weather satellite,
whose microwave sensor was damaged. Japan’s Adeos-2 Earth observation satellite failed com-
French Research Minister Genevieve Fioraso told the French parliament that France’s SSA work was built
with French military investment and that keeping it a dual-use effort is extremely important.
tions have decided to work by
themselves, at least for now.
ESA’s SSA program, when it
was being designed, solicited input from the European Defense
Agency, which is part of the European Union, for advice on military user requirements for space
tracking. That work will now be
set aside until a full-scale SSA program gains traction.
Further complicating ESA’s
SSA work has been the lack of
firm backing by the European
Commission in its 2014-2020
budget.
Philippe Mettens, chairman of
the Belgian Space Policy Office,
MAY 21-23, 2013
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pletely during that period in what
may or may not have been caused
by the solar activity.
Luntama said that on the
ground the Halloween storms
forced nuclear power plants to
operate at reduced output and
forced air traffic controllers to
place restrictions on polar flight
routes out of concern for the
storms’ effect on radio communications at high latitudes.
“We need an operational
space weather monitoring system,” Luntama said. “Users want
forecasts and we can’t do longterm forecasting now. We don’t
understand the solar physics well
enough.”
ESA’s current space weather
program will not end up with an
operational capability by the time
it comes up for renewal in 2016.
But program managers have been
able to take advantage of an opportunity by agreeing to pay for
the continued operations of
ESA’s Proba 2 technology demonstration satellite.
Launched in 2009 into a 700kilometer sun-synchronous orbit,
the 130-kilogram Proba 2 was designed to operate for two years. It
had threatened with forced retirement before the SSA program
board agreed to take responsibility for its operation starting July 1.
Two of Proba 2’s five instruments — an extreme ultraviolet imager and a radiometer —
are designed to examine solar
phenomena.
Nicolas Bobrinsky, ESA’s SSA
program head, said his program
board agreed to spend 1.2 million
euros to operate Proba 2 for 18
months. At the end of this period,
he said, a decision will be made
whether to put the satellite into a
graveyard orbit or continue its use
through 2016.
The immediate focus of the
SSA effort will be to develop prototypes of wide field of view telescopes, developing applications
for space weather prediction and
stitching together a network of
national and European assets that
could contribute to space weather
forecasting, Bobrinsky said.
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14
April 8, 2013
Report Says Cost of GPS Ground Segment Has Grown by $1B
MIKE GRUSS, WASHINGTON
Continuing a trend that has
long hampered U.S. military
space programs, the projected
cost of a next-generation groundcontrol system for the U.S. Air
Force’s GPS navigation constellation has grown by $1 billion in the
last year, according to a report by
Congress’ watchdog agency.
In a report released March 28,
the Government Accountability
Office (GAO) said the contractor
on the GPS Operational Control
Segment (OCX), Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems
of Aurora, Colo., underestimated
the scope and complexity of key
program elements. The report,
“Defense Acquisitions: Assessments of Selected Weapon Programs,” said the OCX issue is typical of the of ground-segment
development struggles that have
plagued Pentagon space programs for years.
The Air Force delayed the
launch of the first next-generation GPS 3 satellite from April
2014 to May 2015 to ensure that
the initial OCX capability is in
place for satellite test and checkout. Preliminary cost estimates on
OCX increased by 43 percent last
year, to almost $3.7 billion,
according to the report.
The steep increase is part of a
long-lasting, stubborn trend in
military space programs. The
GAO said the combined price tag
for seven space and missile defense programs it studied in the
last two years has increased by $4
billion.
The OCX is expected to support the GPS 3 constellation’s
stringent accuracy, anti-jam and information assurance requirements. The system also will be
backward compatible with the current generation of GPS satellites.
Raytheon won the $886.4
million prime contract to develop the OCX in February 2010.
The full system was supposed to
be ready by 2016. But Gen.
William Shelton, commander of
Air Force Space Command, said
in April 2012 that the full capability date could be pushed back
to 2017.
“The program has experienced significant requirements
instability and schedule delays
while in technology development,” the report reads. “The
contractor initially underestimated the scope and complexity of the necessary information
assurance requirements which
required additional personnel
with the necessary expertise
and increased government
management.”
A Raytheon spokeswoman,
Kim Warth, referred questions to
the Air Force.
Steve Moran, Raytheon’s director of GPS mission solutions,
said in June that the OCX contract had undergone significant
changes during the previous six
months, including the addition of
a launch and checkout capability
in December 2011. Previously
Boeing, prime contractor on the
GPS 2F satellites now being
launched, had been considered
for that responsibility.
Information assurance, a primary OCX requirement, also
proved to be a “big challenge,”
Moran said. “It is very important
that we protect this system
against the current and evolving
cyber threats because they are
real and the nation can’t afford
to have this system compromised,” he said.
GAO investigators echoed that
sentiment in interviews, saying cyberthreats continue to change
and can be technologically difficult to defend against.
Information assurance problems have also plagued the Navy’s
Mobile User Objective System
(MUOS). That program will rely
on a network of four satellites and
four main ground stations to provide cellphone-like communications to mobile forces. The estimated total cost of the program
grew by about $515 million from
June 2010 to Sept. 2012, a review
of multiple GAO reports shows.
“Accurately forecasting the
scope and quantity of future requirements and estimating associated costs are problematic,” the
report said of the MUOS program.
Investigators also looked at the
Precision Tracking Space System
program, a proposed constellation of satellites that would track
ballistic missiles during the midcourse portion of the flight.
The GAO report said the total
price tag of the program could be
$18 billion to $37 billion. Officials
SEE GAO PAGE 16
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15
April 8, 2013
NASA Chief: Commercial Crew Safe from Sequester, for Now
NASA Administrator Charles
Bolden said the budget for the
agency’s Commercial Crew Program, an effort to send astronauts
to the international space station
aboard privately owned spacecraft
by 2017, is safe from sequestration
— for now.
“So far, we see no significant
impact the rest of this fiscal year,”
Bolden said March 28 during a
media conference call about
Space Exploration Technologies
Corp.’s (SpaceX) recently completed cargo delivery mission to
“But our projection is that if we
are not able to get out of this condition, it may slow progress on
commercial crew.”
Bolden had warned in February that the Commercial Crew
Program could be among the first
NASA efforts to be slowed by sequestration — automatic spending cuts that phased in March 1
and which would eliminate almost
$1 trillion in federal spending by
2023. NASA’s share of the sequester this year was five percent
of its $17.8 billion top line from
2012, plus a smaller cut Congress
imposed to shield certain military
and civil programs — including
a
rianespace.com
___________________
some at NASA — from sequestration’s full effect. That left the
space agency with $16.65 billion
for 2013, under a six-months
spending bill signed March 26.
Even under these conditions,
the Commercial Crew Program
actually wound up with a slightly
bigger budget for 2013 than it
had in 2012: $489 million instead
of $406 million. However, the increased funding is still far short
of the $830 million the White
House requested for the program this year.
It is not yet clear what alternative to sequestration Congress
might approve. Dueling 10-year
budget plans passed by the House
and Senate last month serve as a
starting point for negotiations.
Meanwhile, the White House is set
to weigh in April 10, when it will at
last transmit its 2014 budget request to Congress. Budget requests are usually made public in
February.
Bolden has gone to bat for the
White House’s commercial crew
request many times, but Congress
has never signaled a willingness to
fund the administration’s signature human spaceflight effort at
that level. His latest plug for a bigger Commercial Crew Program
budget was during a March 20
hearing of the House Appropriations commerce, justice, science
subcommittee.
“If we aren’t able to get up to
the $800 million level, then I will
have to come back and officially
notify the Congress that we cannot make 2017 for availability of
commercial crew,” Bolden said at
that hearing.
Despite that possibility, NASA
is pressing ahead with the next
stages of the Commercial Crew
Program, which is now in the middle of a $1.1 billion development
phase known as Commercial Crew
Integrated Capability (CCiCap).
In the current phase, which began
in August and runs through May
2014, Boeing Space Exploration,
Sierra Nevada Space Systems and
SpaceX are all working on competing designs for crew transportation systems.
NASA will soon begin narrowing the field of commercial crew
competitors, Bolden said at the
March 20 hearing. The agency
plans to issue a request for proposals for follow-on work to CCiCap this summer, Bolden said at
the hearing.
“We intend to put a request for
proposal on the street this summer and you will probably get a
downselect,” Bolden told lawmakers. However, “you won’t see the
selection announced until the
middle of next year, 2014.”
The number of companies
NASA will bounce from the program “is budget dependent,”
Bolden said. The agency would
like to fund as many competing
designs as it can for as long as
possible.
In parallel with CCiCap, NASA
is working on a separate program
to certify that the astronaut transportation systems its commercial
crew partners design are safe for
round trips to the international
space station. The first phase of
this so-called Certification Products Contract is under way now,
and NASA is planning to solicit
bids for the second phase this
summer, according to a notice
posted online March 19.
SEE COMMERCIAL PAGE 16
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16
April 8, 2013
Executives Hopeful for DoD Shift on Bandwidth Leasing
MIKE GRUSS, WASHINGTON
GAO FROM PAGE 14
with the U.S. Missile Defense
Agency, which is developing the
tracking satellites, disputed the
GAO’s estimate, but did not offer
which would allow operators to
plan their fleets accordingly, officials said.
“We don’t have the incentive
to invest” in new capacity without long-term commitments on
the government’s part, said Tip
Osterthaler, president and chief
executive of SES Government
Solutions of McLean, Va., a subsidiary of satellite operator SES
of Luxembourg.
Industr y executives said
wholesale reforms are needed to
prevent a situation in which theirs
is a regional surge in military demand for capacity that commercial operators — who today provide some 90 percent of the
Pentagon’s satellite bandwidth —
dent of the Satellite Industry Association here, said via email.
Privately, however, industry officials were more cautious. Many
said they do not expect U.S. President Barack Obama to seek authority for the Pentagon to enter
into long-term satellite leases as
part of his 2014 federal budget request, now expected to be unveiled the week of April 8.
In optimistic scenarios, Congress could insert such an authorization later in the budget process.
In a worst case scenario, they say,
Kendall’s announcement is merely an idea du jour at the Pentagon
that never gains traction.
Among the recommendations
in the white paper were using
hosted payloads, developing accurate comparisons of commercial
and military satellite communications and establishing a baseline
of how much commercial satellite
bandwidth the Pentagon needs
and addressing that requirement
in multiyear contracts.
The white paper took issue
with the way the Pentagon compares the cost of operating its
own communications satellites
versus procuring commercial
bandwidth. “Often quoted military satellite costs do not even include the launch costs,” the letter says. “Quoted figures
routinely omit the military
ground infrastructure, which
may account for 60-70% of the
total military system cost.”
The letter also points out that
the DoD could save as much as 30
percent on commercial satellite
services by committing to longterm contracts.
In addition to Osterthaler, the
white paper was signed by Ron
Samuel, chief executive of Eutelsat America Corp. of Washington;
Kay Sears, president of Intelsat
General Corp. of Bethesda, Md.;
Daniel Goldberg, president and
chief executive of Telesat of Ottawa, Canada; and Philip Harlow,
president and chief operating officer of Xtar LLC of Herndon, Va.
All of the executives who
signed the white paper represent
companies that operate satellites
or are subsidiaries of companies
that do. When it comes to government buying policies, satellite operators have not always been on
the same page as companies
known as integrators, which lease
commercial capacity to provide
managed solutions to government customers.
One of the largest integrators
is Harris CapRock Government
Solutions of Fairfax, Va. Its president, David Cavossa, welcomed
Kendall’s initiative, saying it could
lead to more business for operators and integrators alike. But he
cautioned the DoD against locking into too many long-term contracts with a single operator and
limiting its flexibility.
another figure that they would allow to be printed, according to
the report.
The GAO also said the longbeleaguered Space Based Infrared System missile warning
program continues to have problems, specifically with the third
and fourth satellites, which are
still under construction. The program experienced a break in production after the second satellite,
forcing prime contractor Lockheed Martin Space Systems of
Sunnyvale, Calif., to requalify certain components.
“According to the program,
development challenges, test fail-
ures, and technical issues have resulted in significant cost growth
and schedule delays for production of the third and fourth satellites,” the report read.
The satellites are scheduled
for delivery in late 2015 and 2016,
respectively.
The nation’s primary missile
shield, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, also had
a hefty increase. The total cost
of the program jumped by
about $1.7 billion, or about 4
percent. The program is trying
to recover from consecutive failures in 2010.
DOD PHOTO BY ERIN A. KIRK-CUOMO
Commercial satellite industry
representatives reacted with cautious optimism to a pledge by the
Pentagon’s top procurement official to study ways to buy bandwidth more efficiently.
Speaking to industry executives in March at a dinner held in
conjunction with the Satellite
2013 conference here, Frank
Kendall, U.S. undersecretary of
defense for acquisition, logistics
and technology, said the Pentagon was launching a 90-day review
of its commercial bandwidth purchasing practices, attendees said.
The study will be undertaken
jointly by Kendall’s office and the
Pentagon’s chief information officer, attendees said.
Industry executives, who have
long pushed the Department of
Defense (DoD) to change what
they characterize as its inefficient
bandwidth leasing practices, characterized Kendall’s initiative as a
baby step forward.
In a best case scenario, they envision the DoD sidestepping oneyear transponder-leasing deals
and instead signing contracts for
capacity that span as many as eight
years, a move that would save the
government hundreds of millions
of dollars.
Such a change would also
give the industry greater clarity
as to future Pentagon needs,
are not positioned to meet. Such a
situation could unfold in Asia,
which is now a strategic focus for
the U.S. military, Osterthaler said
in an interview.
Osterthaler was one of five
satellite industry executives who
drafted a white paper in January
that recommended ways for the
DoD to become a better buyer of
commercial satellite capacity.
Kendall’s initiative appears to
have been a response, at least in
part, to the paper.
The 90-day study is aimed at
“developing specific proposals for
the DoD to acquire commercial
communications satellite capacity
more economically,” U.S. Air
Force Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan, a
Pentagon spokeswoman, wrote in
a response to questions from SpaceNews. “This is likely to involve a legislative initiative that would permit
more flexible, and less expensive,
business arrangements between
DoD and commercial satellite
communications suppliers than
those the DoD uses today.”
The move is being welcomed
by the industry, at least in public
statements.
“The satellite industry is eager
to contribute to the Department’s
assessment of how they can even
more effectively utilize commercial satellite to support essential
requirements with reliable capabilities and with constrained resources,” Patricia Cooper, presi-
Frank Kendall
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COMMERCIAL FROM PAGE 15
Boeing, Sierra Nevada and
SpaceX got about $10 million
each for the first phase of certification work, which must be performed under traditional government contracts. NASA says the
Space Act Agreements it uses to
fund Commercial Crew development work do not allow the
agency to dictate design requirements — something it must do in
order to perform a certification.
NASA is counting on the Commercial Crew program to provide
the United States with an alternative to buying rides for astronauts
aboard Russian Soyuz capsules at
about $65 million a seat.
Comments: dleone@spacenews.com
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18
April 8, 2013
French, German Ariane Compromise Shows Signs of Fraying
The painful compromise on
Europe’s future launch vehicle direction agreed to by France and
Germany during last November’s
conference of European Space
Agency (ESA) governments
showed initial signs of fraying the
week of March 25 in separate
statements by the two nations’
space ministers.
At issue is whether the two nations will agree both to complete
development, through an inaugural flight in 2018, of the Ariane 5
Midlife Evolution (ME) program
while also agreeing to a seven-year
investment of about 4 billion euros
($5.2 billion) in a new rocket called
Ariane 6. The still-unfinanced portion of Ariane 5 ME is estimated at
1 billion euros or more.
At the November ESA ministeri-
al conference, France wanted to
proceed directly to Ariane 6 without
necessarily co-investing in Ariane 5
ME. Germany wanted to complete
Ariane 5 ME — which includes a
large share of work for Astrium’s
Bremen, Germany, site — while reserving judgment on Ariane 6.
Both governments claimed victory after the conference. French
Research Minister Genevieve Fioraso said France won German ap-
French Senate, Fioraso made scant
mention of Ariane 5 ME while portraying Ariane 6 as a done deal.
“Ariane 6 was officially decided,”
Fioraso said. She said Europe’s
launch vehicle industry has plenty
of time to undertake the reorganization necessary to meet Ariane 6’s
cost goals given that Ariane 6 will
not be flying until 2020 or 2021.
That reorganization is likely to
result in a much smaller work force
to produce Ariane 6 rockets than
the 12,000-strong employment base
for today’s Ariane 5 unless market
demand for the vehicle is much
higher than currently predicted,
European launch experts agree.
The following day, at a Bremen
ceremony celebrating the five
years of orbital life of Europe’s
Columbus laboratory at the international space station — Germany
led Europe’s space station development — Hintze put a different spin
on what the November conference
agreed to do.
proval for Ariane 6. Peter Hintze,
Germany’s federal government coordinator for aerospace policy, said
Germany won approval to continue development of Ariane 5 ME.
Fioraso and Hintze headed their
respective delegations to the November conference.
Four months later, both governments appear to have solidified
their opinions.
In a March 26 speech to the
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Proposal for Ariane 6
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22
April 8, 2013
Kepler Space Telescope Reaction Wheel Remains a Concern
Two of Kepler’s four reaction wheels are shown during assembly. One of the wheels has had elevated friction levels.
>
A reaction wheel on NASA’s Kepler spacecraft continues to experience elevated levels
of friction after a brief rest period, but project
officials say that does not necessarily imply an
imminent failure that could jeopardize the
spacecraft’s planet-hunting mission.
Spacecraft engineers in early January noticed increased levels of friction in one of
four reaction wheels on the spacecraft used
for attitude control. To address the problem,
NASA suspended science operations of the
spacecraft for 10 days in January, hoping that
this “wheel rest” period would resolve the issue. However, the high levels of friction continued in wheel No. 4 after normal spacecraft operations resumed in late January.
“The wheel rest period of January 17January 27 appears to have had no beneficial impact on alleviating the elevated friction in reaction wheel #4,” Kepler mission
manager Roger Hunter wrote in an update
posted on the Kepler website March 29. “At
this point, all mitigation steps to preserve
wheel life have been implemented, and no
additional steps are planned at this time.”
Those mitigation steps, deputy project
manager Charlie Sobeck said in an April 3
interview, include using the wheels at a
faster speed and operating them at a higher
temperature to increase the effectiveness of
the wheel’s lubricant. The rest period in January, which was intended to allow the lubricant to redistribute itself in the wheel, had
“a low probability to work to begin with,” he
said, and there are no plans to repeat it.
The elevated friction in wheel No. 4 is of
BALL AEROSPACE PHOTO
JEFF FOUST, WASHINGTON
particular concern because another reaction wheel on the spacecraft, No. 2, failed
last July. Normal spacecraft operations require three working reaction wheels.
Sobeck said that while wheel No. 2 also
exhibited elevated levels of friction prior to
its failure, that does not mean wheel No. 4
is in immediate danger of failing. “The way
it presents itself is very different, and we
don’t quite know what to make of that,” he
said. Wheel No. 2 became “somewhat
chaotic” in the amount of friction it exhibited starting about six months before its failure, he said. Wheel No. 4, by contrast, has
jumped between a baseline level of friction
and an elevated level since its launch four
years ago. After the wheel rest the friction
increased to an even higher level, but then
declined to the previous elevated level. The
other two wheels have behaved normally
throughout the mission.
In the event wheel No. 4 does fail, engineers are studying alternative ways to operate the spacecraft. Sobeck said one option is
a “hybrid” mode using the remaining two reaction wheels and the spacecraft’s thrusters.
This mode, though, would not have the
same degree of pointing accuracy as using
reaction wheels alone, degrading the data
the spacecraft can collect. “Perhaps we
could do some of the kinds of things we’re
doing now with less photometric stability,
but I think it would be very difficult,” he said.
NASA launched Kepler in March 2009 to
detect minute drops in the brightness of
stars caused when planets pass in front of, or
transit, them. As of January, Kepler had detected 2,740 planet candidates, with 115 of
them confirmed. In hybrid mode, though,
Kepler’s ability to detect such exoplanets
would be in doubt. “We wouldn’t be able to
see Earth-sized planets around Sun-like
stars,” Sobeck said. Kepler may still be able
to detect transits by larger exoplanets, something he said is still under investigation.
Kepler could instead be used for alternative observations in hybrid mode, including
searches for extragalactic objects or asteroids.
“It would be a different flavor of mission,” he
said. “It would not be Kepler as we know it,
but it still might provide useful science.”
“We are developing a two-wheel science
case through the exoplanet program,” Paul
Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said at a meeting of the National Research Council’s Committee on Astronomy
and Astrophysics here March 7. He confirmed that exoplanet transits, at least of
Earth-size planets, could not be observed by
Kepler in two-wheel mode. Until that science
case is reviewed, he said, “I can’t tell you how
valuable Kepler two-wheel science is and
whether that makes Kepler worth operating.”
Other than the reaction wheel, Kepler
remains in good health, Sobeck said. The
limiting factors on the spacecraft’s life are
its supply of propellant and its communications link as the spacecraft slowly drifts away
from the Earth in a heliocentric orbit.
The Ball Aerospace & Technologies
Corp.-built spacecraft completed its 3.5year prime mission in November and began
an extended mission that runs through
2016. Sobeck projects that, if Kepler’s reaction wheels keep working, the spacecraft
could operate until late 2018.
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25
April 8, 2013
Job-hungry States Roll Out Red Carpet for Commercial Space Firms
JEFF FOUST, WASHINGTON
‘Texas is probably our leading
candidate’
The Texas site appears to be
picking up momentum. Speaking
at South by Southwest (SXSW), an
arts and technology festival held in
March in Austin, Texas, SpaceX
Chief Executive Elon Musk indicated that Texas was the frontrunner among several potential sites
for the company’s spaceport.
“Right now, Texas is arguably the
leading candidate,” Musk said. “If
things go as expected, it’s likely
that we’ll have a launch site in
Texas.”
The day before his SXSW
speech, Musk also spoke in Austin
about his spaceport plans, this
time at a hearing of the appropriations committee of the Texas
House of Representatives. “This
would be a commercial version of
Cape Canaveral,” he told legislators of his company’s spaceport
plans, playing up the economic
benefits of the site, including
tourism to see launches. “Any support that Texas can offer would
certainly be helpful,” he added.
“Texas is probably our leading candidate right now.”
Musk spoke before the House
committee because SpaceX is
looking for legislative support, at
the very least, from the state. “We
need certain legislation passed
supportive of space launch,” he
said at SXSW. That includes a bill
that amends the state’s “open
beaches” law, allowing beaches to
be closed for a launch. Musk said
he was also looking for “protection
for the 1-in-10,000-person case
who complains about the thing.”
He did not specify what that “protection” would be, although he cited a case where a person sued over
SpaceX’s rocket testing facility
near McGregor, Texas, even
though that person did not live in
the same county as the test site.
Bills addressing both those
concerns are advancing through
the state legislature. A House committee was scheduled April 1 to
take up a bill, HB 2623, that would
allow beaches to be closed for a
launch, with the approval of county commissioners; the bill would
prohibit launches on popular holiday weekends, including Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day. A second bill in the state
House and Senate, HB 1791 and
SB 1636, respectively, would make
adjustments to the state’s existing
spaceflight liability indemnification; it includes a provision whereby “noise arising from lawful space
flight activities” would not be considered “unreasonable noise” under state law.
There also is the potential for
financial incentives, although how
much SpaceX is seeking, and how
much the state is willing to offer, is
not yet clear. “In terms of a specific number, I guess I’m not prepared to say,” said Texas state Rep.
Rene Oliveira, who appeared
alongside Musk at the hearing and
in whose district the proposed
launch site would be located. “We
need to be competitive, that’s how
I’d leave it for now.”
As Oliveira indicated, Texas
does have competition. Musk said
the company is looking at options
in several other states, most no-
tably in Florida. There, state officials have talked about establishing a new launch facility at the
north end of Kennedy Space Center property, at a site known as
Shiloh. That effort was set back
late last year when NASA rejected
a request to transfer about 60
hectares of land at Shiloh to the
state, although agency officials
said they were open to alternative
approaches to support the state’s
interest in a commercial launch facility there. State officials have continued to press for the development of a launch site at Shiloh.
A dark horse in the SpaceX
launch site competition is Georgia. Officials there have been quietly working on proposals to develop a spaceport at a site in Camden
County, on the Atlantic coast just
north of the Florida border. The
SPACEX PHOTO
In a sign of the maturation of
the commercial space industry,
states are deploying some of the
same incentives used to win auto
factories, distribution centers
and office complexes to lure
launch startups from one state to
another.
In the last year, XCOR Aerospace agreed on a deal to move its
Mojave, Calif., headquarters to
Midland, Texas, while signing a
separate deal to later establish in
Florida a manufacturing and operations base. Florida also lured a
smaller suborbital vehicle company, Rocket Crafters, to set up operations in Titusville. But even
bigger deals — and possibly
fiercer competition — are on the
horizon.
Today, the biggest prize that
states are competing for in the
commercial space field is a new
launch site for Space Exploration
Technologies Corp. (SpaceX).
The Hawthorne, Calif.-based company, which launches today from
Cape Canaveral, Fla., and will inaugurate a new launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in June, has indicated for a
couple of years that it is seeking to
establish a third launch site that
would be used predominantly, if
not exclusively, for commercial
missions, and is looking beyond
the usual suspects to find a site.
The leading contender for
SpaceX’s launch site appears to be
a site on the Gulf of Mexico coast
in Texas, near Brownsville. The
company has been interested for
some time in land on the coast
near Boca Chica State Park, a few
kilometers north of the Mexican
border and several kilometers
south of the tip of South Padre Island, a popular resort site. Last
May, at a public hearing that was
part of an environmental review,
several hundred people showed
up, the vast majority of whom, according to local media accounts,
supported the project.
Elon Musk
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported March 27 that Gov. Nathan
Deal met with Musk the prior week
to pitch him on the Georgia spaceport idea. Local officials are considering a range of incentives, including free land, job creation
incentives, tax breaks and work
force training, to attract SpaceX to
the state, the article noted.
A decision on a site will come
soon. Musk told Texas legislators
and the SXSW audience that the
company plans to make a decision
on where to locate its launch site
some time this year. In the bestcase scenario, he said, SpaceX
would start construction of the
spaceport next year, and the first
launches from the new facility
would take place in two to three
years.
Competition versus cooperation
States that are not in the running to land SpaceX’s next launch
site are examining other ways to
make themselves more competitive in the space industry. In February, the Brookings Institution released a report titled “Launch!
Taking Colorado’s Space Economy to the Next Level” that examined how the state, which already
has a robust space sector, can improve it given, among other
threats, “the rise of new competitors, new business models, and
new questions about its competitive underpinnings,” as the report’s summary stated.
Among the report’s recommendations was to shift the reliance the state’s space economy
has on government space programs toward “emerging new
space, adjacent, and global markets.” Specific recommendations
in the report included “modest
‘deal closers’ or small relocation
incentives for innovative small
firms” as well as a “governor’s prize
for new space business plans.”
“We need a bigger foothold in
the NewSpace and adjacent markets,” said Vicky Lea, aerospace industry manager for the Colorado
Space Coalition, at the “Free Enterprise and the Final Frontier”
event held in February at the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce headquarters here. She said local officials were developing “concrete
agenda items” to address issues
raised in the report. “We’re looking pretty hopeful, pretty energized about moving that forward.”
One thing Colorado was doing to attract commercial space
ventures was seeking a spaceport
license for Front Range Airport, a
small airport just east of Denver
that could conceivably support
horizontal takeoff and landing
vehicles. Lea said in February
that the airport planned to submit its license application to the
Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) in the second quarter of
this year; if all goes well, the airport could have its license by the
end of the year.
Spaceport Colorado, as the
Front Range Airport would be
known, will face significant competition from existing spaceports
designed in particular to support
suborbital vehicles, like Spaceport
America in New Mexico and Mojave Air and Space Port in California, as well as other airports seeking spaceport licenses, including
Midland International Airport in
Texas and Houston’s Ellington
Airport. They will all be competing
for a relatively small number of vehicles that can use them; worse,
some airports seeking to become
spaceports cannot support vehicles that take off or land vertically,
because of airspace issues.
While that would suggest fierce
competition among these existing
and planned spaceports, those involved with some of these spaceports have argued that their efforts
are complementary, part of an effort to build up an industry. In other words, a rising industry tide lifts
all spaceports.
Stuart Witt, chief executive of
Mojave Air and Space Port, said at
a panel session during the FAA’s
annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference here that
his spaceport, which hosts the research and development activities
of several companies, could be the
enabler of vehicles that could later
fly from many other spaceports.
“We’re [a research and development] site. We’re not necessarily
an operational site,” he said. “If we
are successful in our endeavors,
they will have many companies to
operate,” referring to officials of
other spaceports on that panel.
Witt emphasized he did not see
competition among the various
spaceports. “We actually talk regularly,” he said. “We actually work together in this industry to promote
the industry and discuss lessons
learned. That’s not publicized in
the press.”
But while there is cooperation
among spaceports, there is still
competition as well, particular
when rare opportunities like
SpaceX’s interest in a commercial
launch site — a perhaps once-ina-decade opportunity — arise.
And even after that opportunity,
the airports and other sites seeking to become spaceports will vie
with one another to attract business, with the potential that, like
the last spaceport boom in the
late 1990s, there may simply not
be enough demand to sustain all
of their ambitions.
As long as there is a perceived
economic benefit from spaceflight
and the commercial space industry, though, local and state officials
will continue to try to bring more
of it to their states, just as they do
with many other industries.
“Spaceports can be tremendous
economic engines,” said Dale
Nash, executive director of the
Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport
in Virginia. “It’s very advantageous
for states to get into the space
business.”
A version of this article originally appeared in
The Space Review.
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26
April 8, 2013
Scotland’s 1st Spacecraft Is Tiny Satellite with Big Mission
LEONARD DAVID, GOLDEN, Colo.
Starting small
CLYDE SPACE ARTIST'S CONCEPT
The Clyde Space UKube-1, the first satellite to be built in Scotland, is completing final testing for
launch later this year.
>
Scotland’s first satellite will
soon find a home in orbit around
the Earth — a forerunner of
things to come under a collaborative, national nanosatellite program in the United Kingdom.
Dubbed UKube-1, the small,
novel cubesat spacecraft has been
constructed by Clyde Space at its
West of Scotland Science Park in
Glasgow and is completing final
testing for launch later this year
onboard a Russian Soyuz rocket
from the Baikonur Cosmodrome
in Kazakhstan. Cubesats measure
10 centimeters a side and generally weigh about 1 kilogram.
The small but powerful spacecraft comprises payloads that include the first GPS device aimed at
measuring space weather in Earth’s
plasmasphere — the innermost layer of the planet’s magnetosphere.
The satellite also comes equipped
with a camera that will take pictures
of Earth from space and test the effect of radiation on space hardware
using a new generation of imaging
sensor, and an experiment to
demonstrate the feasibility of using
cosmic radiation to improve the security of communications satellites
and to flight test lower-cost electronic systems.
The UKube-1 satellite also
totes a payload made up of five ex-
Clark said there are a number
of new developments from Clyde
Space on the mission including deployable solar panels — there are
three on UKube-1 — as well as advanced attitude and control technology, a sophisticated miniature
sun sensor and specialized software
that other cubesats can use.
periments that U.K. students and
the public can interact with.
“It’s one small satellite for
Clyde and a giant leap for their extraterrestrial export business and
a new hope for space science in
Scotland,” First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond said.
UKube-1 is a U.K. Space
Agency mission. The mission has
been funded jointly by Clyde
Space and a number of funding
partners including the U.K. Space
Agency, the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Technology Strategy Board and Scot-
tish Enterprise.
UKube-1 will be supported by
three U.K. ground stations.
“We started designing our
nanosatellite platform in 2008 as a
means to stimulate some funding
from the U.K. government as part
of a national cubesat program,”
Craig Clark, chief executive of
Clyde Space, said.
Nanosatellites are the fastestgrowing space subsector, with the
United Kingdom able to tap into
both heritage and expertise that
primes the pump in building future small satellites, Clark added.
There is value in “starting
small” as there are many factors
that go into working on a
nanosatellite, Clark said.
“I think that the main thing to
consider in terms of the differences in building a tiny satellite
over a much larger satellite is that
both have to work in space and perform very similar functions,” Clark
said. “Therefore, there is still a massive technical and programmatic
challenge in seeing a successful
space mission through from start
to finish no matter what the size.”
Clark said that many larger
space organizations still view
nanosatellites as toys. “But the
fact of the matter is that they are
staying away from them because
they can’t see a business case for
themselves in producing cubesats,” he said. “Let’s face it, a
space company with a turn-over
of over $1 billion isn’t going to be
interested in a full mission sale of
less than $500,000. … It would be
too much risk for them.”
This is good news for small
space companies, Clark said, as
they are able to innovate more
and are rapidly increasing the utility value of cubesats. So much so
that major space users are now
looking to cubesats and nanosatellites to fill gaps in capturing wanted and valuable data, he said.
“The big difference in cost and
technical skill when it comes to
cubesats over larger missions is the
availability of off-the-shelf subsystems that can be used,” Clark said.
Clyde Space has invested its
own money into UKube-1 as part
of their product development
strategy, Clark said.
“Our reason for doing this is
because we wanted to develop an
advanced cubesat platform that we
can then market as a full mission
capability for organizations that
want to put payloads into space but
don’t want to have to worry about
the satellite itself,” Clark said.
It is a growing competitive
market, with agencies, military
and commercial customers hungry to have an active role in space.
“Anyone who puts a satellite
into space wants to give the mission the best chance of success,”
Clark added. “If we are successful
in our business plan, UKube-1 will
be the first of many more Scottish
satellites.”
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28
April 8, 2013
CASIS Taps Renowned Street Artist for ISS Mission Patch
ROBERT Z. PEARLMAN, HOUSTON
CASIS/FICTION PHOTO
Patch promotion
CASIS/FICTION PHOTO
A celebrated street artist has turned
his attention spaceward, designing a mission patch for the first set of sponsored
experiments to be sent to the U.S. National Laboratory on the international
space station (ISS).
Graphic designer Shepard Fairey, perhaps best known for his stylized “HOPE”
poster of Barack Obama from the 2008
presidential campaign, but also recognized
for his work through the movement OBEY,
was recruited by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) to
create an emblem to represent ARK1, the
organization’s first set of investigations flying under the increment name Advancing
Research Knowledge 1.
“The idea of doing something that is actually going to go into space and be part of
exploring new technology that is unknown, I think that even just tangentially, is
an amazing thing to be connected to,”
Fairey said in a video statement released by
CASIS and the design agency Fiction. “I
was really excited to be invited to be part of
this project.”
CASIS is the nonprofit organization selected by NASA in 2011 to manage and promote science investigations onboard the
international space station, which in 2005
was designated a National Laboratory by
Congress.
ARK1, which is set to launch this fall
onboard a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Dragon cargo spacecraft flying
its third NASA-contracted commercial re-
are two overlapping circles with the numbers 37 and 38. The ARK1 research will be
conducted on the international space station by Expedition 37 and Expedition 38
crew members, including NASA astronauts
Karen Nyberg and Michael Hopkins.
ARK1 patch
Shepard Fairey
supply mission to the station, is planned to
include protein crystallization research
and binary colloidal alloy tests, as well as
the education program “Story Time From
Space.”
The CASIS payload aboard the Dragon
capsule will also include a number of
Fairey’s ARK1 mission patches.
“I’m amazingly spoiled in the range of
awesome projects that I have gotten to do,
but this is something I’ve never been able
to do and I think it is maybe a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Fairey said.
Fairey’s ARK1 triangular-shaped insignia borrows its blue and green colors
from the CASIS logo, which itself is part of
the design. Above the geodesic dome and
central to the emblem is a depiction of the
international space station.
“I wanted to convey the most appealing
aspects of the station and then also maybe
get a sense of motion,” Fairey said. “But
with a patch being so small, you really need
to simplify the elements to make them
work in an iconic way.”
On the patch, the station is shown in a
configuration that includes components
that are either no longer in flight — the
space shuttle — or, like the Russian science
power platform extending from the “top”
of the orbiting outpost, were canceled before leaving the ground. Both elements
continue to be common in a number of
other depictions of the space station, including those still in use by NASA.
“Reducing and abstracting the space
station to something that worked with really simple forms but was still really pleasing
was a big part of the objective,” Fairey said.
Above the space station on the patch
“The unveiling of this patch signifies a
historic moment in the aerospace community, where a third-party entity is moving forward to send payloads to the ISS that will benefit all humankind,” said Jim Royston, CASIS
interim executive director. “Having a gifted
and celebrated artist like Shepard Fairey designing this significant patch allows CASIS to
reach new audiences that will enhance our
mission of promoting the National Lab.”
CASIS revealed the patch at the recent
Engadget Expand Conference in San Francisco, where they also promoted a partnership with the MassChallenge startup competition and accelerator program to find
and award new projects to be launched to
Conference attendees had the opportunity to pick up one of the patches, as well as
possibly win a patch signed by Fairey. According to Fiction, Engadget also plans to
give away artist-autographed patches
through its website.
“I’m flattered and honored that I could
create something that becomes just a small
symbol of how things can move forward, the
excitement of the unknown,” Fairey said.
“To be part of that is really a cool thing.”
Robert Z. Pearlman is editor of collectSPACE.com
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29
April 8, 2013
Hints of Dark Matter Have NASA Scientists over the Moon
MIRIAM KRAMER, WASHINGTON
Patience and meticulous
science were cause for celebration when an international
team of scientists announced
new results pointing to the
possible detection of dark matter by a $2 billion cosmic ray
observatory mounted on the
exterior of the international
space station.
Known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS),
the bus-size particle physics
experiment has observed a
striking pattern of antimatter
particles called positrons that
may turn out to be a product
of collisions between dark
matter particles.
“I think it is fair to say that
this is the most important
physics result thus far to come
from the International Space
Station,” theoretical physicist
Robert Garisto, who was not involved in the AMS project but
published the April 3 results,
said via Twitter.
Although the James E. Webb
Auditorium at NASA headquarters here was nearly empty during an April 3 press conference
to announce the science results
from the first 18 months of AMS
operations, it did not stop space
agency officials and scientists
from enthusiastically unveiling
the findings.
“There have been little
glitches, but the end product is
here for all of us to see and it’s
a happy day,” Michael Salamon,
AMS program manager at the
U.S. Department of Energy’s
Office of Science, said during
the briefing.
By sifting through a yearand-a-half of data, scientists
have found about 400,000
positrons — the antimatter
partner particles of electrons
— that are at the right energy
to suggest they were created
when particles of dark matter
collided and annihilated each
other.
“Some days, my job is really
great, and this is one of those
days where my job is really
great,” William Gerstenmaier,
NASA associate administrator
for human exploration and operations, said.
Although the results might
be exciting, the $2 billion detector that collected them almost never made it to space.
NASA canceled the AMS
program due to concerns for
astronaut safety in 2005, two
years after the Space Shuttle
Columbia accident.
The cancellation caused a
backlash in the scientific community, leading Congress to
approve funding for an extra
shuttle mission to bring the
instrument to the orbiting
outpost.
“I guess it teaches us that
patience is an important quality to have,” Gerstenmaier
said. “There were times where
we were uncertain about exactly what the future was going to be, we knew the quality
of science was pretty strong
and was pretty important and
the team hung in there … and
eventually things worked
out.”
The AMS was launched to
the international space station
aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in May 2011, and has been
sending back data since its installation.
The particle physics experiment is led by Nobel laureate
Samuel Ting, a physics profes-
sor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with 200
scientists from 56 different institutions in 16 countries participating on the science team.
The results announced April
3 represent the first chunk of
data published by the AMS science team.
“I think it’s just kind of the
beginning of other great things
that will come from this instrument on board space station,”
Gerstenmaier said.
Dark matter is an invisible
substance thought to make up
more than 80 percent of the
matter in the universe. Dark
matter is difficult to detect because it rarely interacts with
normal matter, except through
its gravitational pull.
One of the leading explanations for dark matter is that it is
made up of weakly interacting
massive particles, or WIMPS,
which may produce a detectable signature when they
collide and annihilate each
other.
Searching for this signature
was one of the main motivations for building the Alpha
Magnetic
S p e c t r o m e t e r.
Whether or not the instrument
succeeds in detecting dark matter, scientists say they are happy
with the early results from AMS
so far.
“It’s a very major step forward by at least an order of
magnitude in sensitivity,” said
Brown University physicist
Richard Gaitskell, a founding
investigator on the Large Underground Xenon experiment, which aims to make a direct detection of dark matter
particles.
Clara Moskowitz contributed from New York.
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April 8, 2013
NASA Planetary Science Bracing for Brunt of Sequester
As NASA begins to apportion the 5
percent budget cut mandated under sequestration, parts of the U.S. space
agency are being asked to cough up
more so that others can cough up less or
be spared altogether, a senior NASA official told an advisory panel April 4.
NASA’s Planetary Science Division,
which Congress favored with a $200
million increase in the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013
(H.R. 933) that President Barack Obama signed into law March 26, is expected to lose most if not all of that money
as sequestration siphons some $900
million off the agency’s enacted $17.5
billion top line.
James Green, NASA’s Planetary Science Division director, told members
of the NASA Advisory Council’s planetary science subcommittee not to expect a straight 5 percent across-theboard cut as the agency rolls its top line
back to $16.6 billion, as required under
sequestration.
In order to protect higher-priority
programs, Green said, NASA will be
cutting lower-priority programs, including planetar y science, by more
than 5 percent.
“We are not a protected program, we
ARIANE FROM PAGE 18
In a summary of the event,
Astrium referred to the November conference as having
agreed to “the further development of Ariane 5 ME and possibly Ariane 6.”
“The decision to continue
the development of Ariane 5
ME with the new upper stage
was important,” Hintze said, according to a summary of his re-
NASA PHOTO BY CARLA CIOFFI
James Green
are not a high-priority program,” Green
told his fellow planetary scientists. “Consequently, you can assume that [the
Planetary Science Division’s reduction]
would be higher.”
Green did not say which agency pro-
marks provided by Astrium.
“There was a lot riding on that
decision, particularly for the
Bremen location with its upper
stage expertise.”
In March 27 testimony to the
French National Assembly, Arianespace Chief Executive JeanYves Le Gall, who on April 3 was
appointed president of the
French space agency, CNES,
said it remains unclear whether
Ariane 5 ME will be funded
grams would be spared, but NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has previously identified the James Webb Space
Telescope, the Space Launch System
heavy-lift rocket and the Commercial
Crew Program as top administration
priorities.
“The agency had already informed
Congress that certain things will be protected,” Green said. “So we will have a
reduced program below the funding
Congress has provided.”
Congress included $1.39 billion in
H.R. 933 for NASA’s Planetary Science
Division — a $200 million increase compared with the $1.19 billion the division
was getting under a stopgap spending
bill that expired March 27.
The exact amount of funding planetary science will lose will not be known
for about a month, when NASA sends
Congress its proposed operating plan
for the remainder of 2013, Green said.
If planetary science loses too much of
the increase it got from Congress, it
could spell the end of Green’s plan to
solicit proposals next year for a Discovery-class mission that would launch
around the end of the decade.
“I’m working very hard to find anything and everything I can to move Discover y out of 2015 and into 2014,”
Green said. However, “sequestration will
through to its inaugural flight.
“We'll be spending two years
working on Ariane 5 while beginning work on Ariane 6 —
with a maximum amount of
synergy between them to save
money,” Le Gall said. “We'll see
in late 2014 what decisions to
take based on three elements:
First, cost estimated for Ariane
6. Second, the evolution of the
[launch services] market and its
requirements. The last is finan-
undoubtedly affect that.”
Discovery missions are cost-capped at
$425 million, not including launch, and
led by the proposing scientist, or principal investigator.
Diana Simpson, a Republican staff
member on the House Appropriations
Committee, said NASA does not have to
cut every program by an equal 5 percent
in order to comply with sequestration.
“They have some discretion in how
they can respond to [sequestration] and
adjust,” Simpson said here April 4 during a meeting of the National Research
Council’s Space Studies Board. “They
can make proposals to mitigate the impact of those cuts on certain programs
and try to get them back to funding levels that they need to be at in order to
achieve their goals for the year.
“Of course, the other side of that is
that in order to mitigate cuts in some
programs, you have to make even bigger
cuts in other areas.”
Across town, Green hammered
home much the same message to his
constituents.
To shield priority activities, he said,
NASA “has to come up with that money
somewhere else. It does so by taxing, if
you will … parts of the program that
have less of a priority, from the administration’s perspective.”
cial — we’ll have to work within
the budgets available.”
As for Ariane 6, Astrium said
that “a study to clarify unresolved issues around the successor launch system … will be
completed by mid-2013.”
At the ESA ministerial conference, France agreed to invest
115 million euros in the twoyear development work now under way for Ariane 6. Germany
invested 10 million euros.
______________________
For Ariane 5 ME, Germany
agreed to invest 88 million euros, with France, whose industry builds about 50 percent of
Ariane 5, investing 77 million
euros.
A third category of investment in a common upper stage
for Ariane 5 ME and Ariane 6,
both based on the Vinci
restartable engine under development by Snecma of
France, received 97 million euros in commitments from
France and 108 million euros
from Germany.
The ESA ministerial conference planned for mid-2014 will
deal not only with the prickly Ariane 5 ME/Ariane 6 transition,
but also with future funding of
Germany’s role in financing
the space station has increased
with the reduced contributions
of France and Italy, a fact that
the German government has
criticized.
In her March 26 address to
the French Senate, Fioraso
highlighted France’s success in
reducing its space station participation to 20 percent from 27
percent following “a compromise with Germany.”
ESA had asked its governments for 1.32 billion euros for
space station over the two
years to the end of 2014. It received just under 1.1 billion in
part because of the reductions
in support from France and
Italy. Of the money committed, Germany invested about
41 percent. France contributed about 21 percent and
Italy, 9.2 percent.
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31
ON THE MOVE
neering activities in support of its
customers.
Tanous joins Universal Space
Network with 28 years of aero-
April 8, 2013
space and defense leadership experience gained through an extensive military and private ind u s t r y c a r e e r. Ta n o u s m o s t
recently served as program manager with Raytheon Corp., where
he was responsible for developing and executing space control/space protection strategies
for the Advanced Programs
product line.
å The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Washington, appoints STEVEN
M. KAHN director of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)
project in Cerro Pachon, Chile.
Kahn succeeds Sidney C. Wolff
and retains his current affiliation with Stanford University’s
SLAC National Accelerator
Laboratory.
In his new role, Kahn leads
LSST into the construction
phase. He previously served as
associate laboratory director of
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and chairman of the
Physics Department at Stanford
and Columbia universities.
Comments: Tom Wiseman,
twiseman@spacenews.com
____________
LaunchReport
MONTHLY
A Space Exploration Technologies Falcon 9 rocket (right) launched the company’s CRS 2 commercial resupply mission to the international space station March 1
from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket launched the U.S. Air Force’s second Space Based Infrared System geosynchronous satellite March 9 from Canaveral Air Force Station. An International Launch Services Proton M rocket launched the Satmex 8 broadband satellite for
Satelites Mexicanos March 27 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
SPACEX PHOTO
å MATT POTHECARY (above) is
promoted to the position of vice
president for Thales Group
communications.
Pothecary joined Thales in
2000 as an international group
press officer. He also served as
communications director of
ThalesRaytheonSystems,
Thales Air Systems and Thales
Avionics.
MARCH launches
Date
Launch site
Vehicle and provider
Payload and owner
Outcome or purpose
March 1
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station,
Fla.
Falcon 9, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX)
SpaceX CRS 2, SpaceX
Launched a commercial resupply mission to the
international space station.
March 19
Fla.
Atlas 5, United Launch Alliance
SBIRS GEO 2, U.S. Air Force
Launched the second Space Based Infrared System geosynchronous satellite.
March 27
Baikonur Cosmodrome,
Kazakhstan
Proton M, International Launch Services
Satmex 8, Satelites Mexicanos
Launched a broadband satellite.
March 28
Kazakhstan
Soyuz FG, TsSKB-Progress
Soyuz TMA-08M, Russian Federal Space Agency
Launched new crew members to the international
space station.
Launch site
Payload and owner
Outcome or purpose
April 15
Kazakhstan
Anik G1, Telesat
To launch a communications satellite.
April 17
Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport,
Wallops Island, Va.
Antares, Orbital Sciences Corp.
Cygnus mass simulator, Orbital Sciences Corp.
To launch the first Antares rocket, carrying a simulated Cygnus spacecraft.
April 19
Kazakhstan
Soyuz 2-1b, Russian Space Forces
Bion M1, Russian Federal Space Agency
To launch a capsule with live animals, plants and
other life sciences experiments for exposure to
microgravity, and several cubesats.
April 20
Guiana Space Center, Kourou,
French Guiana
Vega, Arianespace
Proba-V, ESA; VNREDSat 1A, Vietnamese government
To launch a pair of Earth observation satellites.
April 24
Kazakhstan
Soyuz, TsSKB-Progress
Progress 51P, Russian Federal Space Agency
To launch a resupply mission to the international
space station.
April 25
Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center,
China
Long March 2D, China Academy of Launch Vehicle
Technology
Gaofen 1, Chinese Ministry of Land and Resources
To launch a remote sensing satellite.
April 26
Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia
Soyuz 2-1b, Russian Space Forces
Glonass K, Russian Federal Defense Agency
To launch a navigation satellite.
April
Xichang Satellite Launch Center,
China
Long March 3B, China Academy of Launch Vehicle
Technology
Chinasat 11, China Satellite Communications Corp.
Launch site
Payload and owner
Outcome or purpose
May 8
Fla.
Delta 4, United Launch Alliance
WGS 5, U.S. Air Force
To launch a military communications satellite.
May 15
Fla.
Atlas 5, United Launch Alliance
GPS 2F-4, U.S. Air Force
To launch a navigation satellite.
May 27
Guiana Space Center, Kourou,
French Guiana
Soyuz 2-1b, Arianespace
O3b, O3b Networks
To launch four communications satellites.
May 28
Kazakhstan
Soyuz FG, TsSKB-Progress
Soyuz TMA-09M, Russian Federal Space Agency
To launch new crew members to the international
space station.
May
Kazakhstan
Eutelsat 3D, Eutelsat
May
Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center,
China
Long March 4B, China Academy of Launch Vehicle
Technology
CBERS 3, Chinese and Brazilian governments
To launch a remote sensing satellite.
APRIL launches
Date
Meanwhile, ALEXANDRE PERRA
(above) is promoted to the position of deputy director for group
communications. He also remains in charge of group media
relations.
Perra joined Thales in 2008 as
an internal communications
manager at Thales International.
He also served as corporate press
officer and head of the Media Relations department.
å Busek Co. Inc., Natick,
Mass., names retired U.S. Navy
Rear Adm. GARRY R. WHITE vice chairman of the board.
White had a distinguished 33year naval career that included
serving as commanding officer of
a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, of an F/A-18 Strike Fighter
Squadron and of Strike Force
Training Atlantic.
Busek Co. manufactures advanced electric propulsion
thrusters for use on military,
government and commercial
satellites.
å Universal Space Network
Inc., Horsham, Pa., names STEPHEN
M. TANOUS vice president for operations and engineering. In his new
role, Tanous oversees all of the
company’s operations and engi-
MAY launches
Date
Compiled by Tom Wiseman, SpaceNews
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32
April 8, 2013
Draper’s GENIE Guides Rocket to Simulated Planetary Landing
Masten Space Systems’ Xombie rocket (above left) is boosted by Draper Laboratory’s Guidance Embedded Navigator Integration Environment, or GENIE, 500 meters off its launch pad at the Mojave Air
and Space Port in California, then brought in for a landing on a target 300 meters away. At right, Tye Brady, principal investigator for GENIE, makes final adjustments to the system before liftoff.
>
An autonomous landing system
made by Draper Laborator y, which
could one day guide crewed landers
and robotic rovers safely to ground
even amid treacherous alien terrain,
successfully flew a Masten Space Systems rocket on a simulated planetary
descent trajectory in the Mojave
Desert.
Without a human being in the loop,
Draper’s Guidance Embedded Navigator Integration Environment, or GENIE, boosted Masten’s Xombie rocket
500 meters off its launch pad at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California,
then brought the vehicle in for a landing on a target 300 meters away. The
flight, which took place March 25, lasted 80 seconds.
“Within that GENIE system all of the
software is present that you could go
from lunar orbit to a precision landing
capability of 100 meters or so on the
Moon,” said Tye Brady, principal investigator for GENIE at the Cambridge,
Mass.-based Draper Laboratory.
The March 25 flight, one of two
Draper and Masten conducted over a
four-day period in March at Masten’s
home base of Mojave, also qualified
GENIE for use in future NASA tests of
entry, descent and landing instruments
and software, Brady said.
Draper and Masten have been working together on GENIE since 2011. The
last time they flew together before the
March tests in Mojave was February
2012, when a GENIE-guided Xombie
hit an altitude of 50 meters before
boosting another 50 meters downrange
for a landing.
The tests that took place in March
were originally to have flown in September. Draper wanted to test GENIE
on Masten’s reusable Xaero rocket, but
that vehicle was destroyed in September. On the way down from 1 kilometer,
a problem traced to a stuck check valve
triggered Xaero’s self destruct system.
NASA PHOTOS BY TOM TSCHIDA
No Draper hardware was on the rocket
for that flight. Masten is now working
on a Xaero successor, Xaero-B, which is
slated to begin hot-fire tests of its
Katana engine later this year before
moving on to tethered flight tests.
G E N I E i s p a r t o f N A S A’s A u tonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) program,
which is managed by the Johnson
Space Center in Houston. ALHAT was
conceived in 2005 to mature systems
needed for landing spacecraft in unexplored terrain.
Systems built under the program
were supposed to be a piece of the canceled Altair lunar lander concept, part
of the Constellation Moon-exploration
program canceled by the White House
in 2010.
Except for helping to mature other
landing technologies, there is little left
for GENIE to do on Earth. According
to the technology maturity scale used
by NASA, GENIE would have to fly in
space to progress beyond its
Te c h n o l o g y R e a d i n e s s L e v e l o f 6 ,
Brady said.
NASA does not have many landed
missions in the works, and the two in
development now — a small Mars lander called InSight launching in 2016
and a clone of the Mars Science Laboratory missions’ Curiosity rover headed to Mars in 2020 — will not be using
GENIE.
However, Brady said that landers
equipped with a GENIE unit, which can
calculate descent trajectories on the fly
and perform automated avoidance ma-
neuvers if it detects obstacles in its
path, would be capable of landing at
sites more scientifically compelling
than the relatively safe landing spots
chosen for the flagship Mars Science
Laboratory mission.
“When you have a multibillion-dollar mission, you become a little risk
averse, for sure,” Brady said. “But you
could imagine that if you could land in
close proximity to really difficult features, it actually is somewhat of a game
changer. If you can lower the cost of
those landers, make their design somewhat reusable, one could consider
landing in multiple spots around the
planet in the same mission, maybe for
the same amount of money.”
Comments: dleone@spacenews.com
__________
Virgin Galactic’s suborbital
s p a c e p l a n e S p a c e S h i p Tw o
soared through the California
sky April 3 in an unpowered
flight test meant to pave the
way for future passenger trips
to space.
SpaceShipTwo was released
at high altitude from its
WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft and glided to a runway
landing at the Mojave Air and
Space Port. The successful
drop moves the craft closer to
its first hot-engine flight using
its hybrid rocket motor.
Bill Deaver, veteran Mojave
Air and Space Port tarmac
watcher, said SpaceShipTwo
glided to its landing at 8:40
a.m. local time.
“The flight followed the
usual pattern with the drop
and glide preceded by a fuel
dump from the spaceship,”
Deaver said. “The weather was
perfect and the wind was blowing out of the east, which
meant that when the spaceship slid to a stop on its landing gear and wooden nose
skid, the handful of spectators
got a whiff of burnt wood.”
Virgin Galactic Chief Executive George Whitesides said
the test flight included a
demonstration of SpaceShipTwo’s ability to “feather” its tail
section, rotating the tail up to
a 65-degree angle from the
ship’s body. The safety feature
is designed to increase the
drag force on the vehicle as it
flies through the atmosphere
on its return from the edge of
space.
“ We a l s o t e s t e d c o m p o nents of the rocket motor system,” Whitesides said. “The
team executed very well
throughout and brought us
another important step closer
to first powered flight.”
SpaceShipTwo’s Rocket Motor 2 underwent its 27th fullscale, flight design hot-fire test
March 30, with “all objectives
completed,” according to a
statement from the spacecraft’s
builder, Mojave, Calif.-based
Scaled Composites.
The first piloted free flight
of SpaceShipTwo took place
Oct. 10, 2010, at Mojave Air
and Space Port. The extensive
test shakeouts of the spaceplane and its engine are in
preparation for taking paying
passengers to the edge of
space, with commercial flights
slated to start from New Mexico’s Spaceport America.
The passenger ticket price
for a SpaceShipTwo suborbital
trek is $200,000. Virgin Galactic has taken deposits from
more than 500 paying passengers. Flights are slated to begin in 2014.
>
LEONARD DAVID, GOLDEN, Colo.
BILL DEAVER/DEAVER-WIGGINS AND ASSOCIATES
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Feathers its Wings in Drop Test
SpaceShipTwo was released at high altitude from its mothership, the WhiteKnightTwo, and glided to
the ground in its April 3 test flight.
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April 8, 2013
COMMENTARY
< EDITORIAL >
LETTERS
Living with Sequestration
Space Programs Will Weather the Storm, but Emerge Weaker
T
here’s a parallel to be drawn between the specter of a killer aster- Force Space Command, said his budget will lose $500 million under seoid bearing down on Earth, something that’s gotten a lot of atten- questration, compromising its ability to track man-made space junk. He
tion of late, and the indiscriminate U.S. federal budget cuts known said the Air Force will not be able to operate its space surveillance assets
at full capacity, which will degrade the accuracy of the service’s everas sequestration that took effect March 1.
In both cases — one a remote possibility, the other an immediate changing catalog of Earth-orbiting objects that government and commerreality — authorities see disaster coming but are unable to prevent it. cial satellite operators rely on for collision avoidance.
Scaling back space surveillance is the exact opposite of what the Air
But unlike the celestial doomsday scenario, where the rogue space
rock is detected too late to mount an effective defense, there was more Force — and the White House — recognize must be done to deal efthan enough time to avert sequestration, a misguided policy that was set fectively with the rapidly growing threat to space operations posed by
in agonizingly slow motion by the White House and Congress over a year- congestion in the orbital environment.
Another negative, if less dramatic, impact of sequestration is the ban
and-a-half ago. Congress simply chose to do nothing as the sequestration deadline inched closer, while the White House shrugged its shoul- on so-called nonessential travel by Air Force and NASA officials, such as
to professional conferences. This might provide some short-term savings,
ders and pointed fingers.
It also turns out that sequestration, while certainly painful, is not but sacrificed in the process are the interchanges, both formal and inquite the budgetary Armageddon that many U.S. government officials, formal, between government and industry that help spur the innovation
particularly in the Department of Defense, made it out to be. Had the that now is more important than ever. Innovation often comes from the
Pentagon reacted to the impending cuts with a solid contingency plan smaller companies, for which conferences are a primary avenue of access
to government officials.
— as opposed to hyperbole and
is unclear whether these and
denial — it might not be furloughIf today’s politics-above-all-else ethic still otherIt impacts
will be limited to 2013
ing workers at the moment.
But sequestration is not without permeates elected officialdom when a killer or will continue indefinitely as the
Congress and the White House conadverse medium- to long-term conasteroid threat truly manifests itself, this tinue to play the blame game. Until
sequences for the space enterprise.
the two sides manage to find a poDepending on how much flexibility
planet
is
surely
in
a
heap
of
trouble.
litical face-saving way out, the Penthe U.S. Air Force is given to shift
tagon, along with NASA and the U.S.
money among spending accounts,
the service might be forced to stretch out some of its satellite develop- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), must operate
ment programs to accommodate reductions of roughly 8 percent. Some under the assumption that sequestration is here to stay.
The good news is that space programs are so vital that they enjoy a
of the Air Force’s mature satellite production programs are under fixedprice contracts that might have to be renegotiated unless the service measure of protection from sequestration’s ravages. Congress seems to
can find some way to maintain previously expected funding levels. In get this, as evidenced by 2013 spending legislation that, while six
both cases the resulting delays will drive cost increases that offset any months late, provides respectable funding levels for most military space
programs. Lawmakers also singled out a NOAA weather satellite program
savings from sequestration.
Even if the Air Force seeks and wins congressional approval to re- for a significant increase even while holding the agency as a whole to
program funds to keep its major space hardware programs on track, that its 2012 spending level.
But even if it’s not the end of the world, sequestration remains a termoney has to come from somewhere, and one likely bill payer is other
rible policy that should never have happened. If today’s politics-abovespace activities.
During a March 19 congressional hearing called to assess the nation’s all-else ethic still permeates elected officialdom when a killer asteroid
readiness to fend off an asteroid, Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air threat truly manifests itself, this planet is surely in a heap of trouble.
Felix H. Magowan
Chairman
fmagowan@spacenews.com
_____________
Tel: +1-303-443-4360
William A. Klanke
President & Publisher
bklanke@spacenews.com
____________
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Warren Ferster
Editor
wferster@spacenews.com
____________
Tel: +1-703-658-8418
SPACENEWS is a
registered trademark of SpaceNews, Inc.
Deputy Editor:
Brian Berger
bberger@spacenews.com
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opallrome@barak_________
online.net
_____
Iridium Still Holding Strong
Against Inmarsat Competition
The headline of the March 7 article “Inmarsat’s ISatPhone Pro Handset Outselling
Iridium’s Pricier Offering” [page 4] is inaccurate. Iridium outsold Inmarsat’s handsets
by tens of thousands during this time frame;
moreover, the value of each of those sales
contributes substantially more revenue to
our bottom line. Iridium’s handset portfolio
is valued for its premium offerings and reliability, allowing us to generate hundreds of
dollars more for the devices we sell.
The corresponding graphic refers to
something completely different: Inmarsat’s
marginal lead in new voice subscribers
since 2011, when Inmarsat entered the market. While this might be accurate, if you’re
going to make this comparison, isn’t the
economic value of those subscribers what
actually matters? With an average revenue
per user of approximately one-third of Iridium’s, Inmarsat would have to outsell us by
3-to-1 to generate the same amount of revenue. So in essence, Inmarsat is making far
less cash flow on its combined equipment
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We can all agree that Inmarsat has sold a
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a target for Iridium’s premium product line.
Our year-over-year handset sales have remained consistent since the ISatPhone entered the market, and we are confident that
our position remains strong. With our continued investment and innovation, we expect that to continue.
Matthew J. Desch
McLean, Va.
The writer is chief executive of Iridium.
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April 8, 2013
Addressing the Challenges of Space Security
< FRANK A. ROSE >
I
n June 2010, President Barack Obama
signed the latest U.S. National Space
Policy. The 2010 policy acknowledged
the changes in the outer space environment since the 2006 National Space Policy
was released. The interconnected nature
of space capabilities and the world’s growing dependence on space-derived information and systems are key aspects of this
change. Additionally, the policy signaled
greater emphasis on expanding international cooperation on mutually beneficial
space activities to broaden and extend the
benefits of space, and further the peaceful
use of space. It also directed the U.S. government to strengthen stability in space
through domestic and international measures to promote the safe and responsible
use of the space environment, improve information collection and sharing for space
collision avoidance, and strengthen measures to mitigate orbital debris.
So what has the U.S. government done
to address space security challenges since
the release of the National Space Policy in
June 2010?
Over the past three years, we have begun
numerous space security discussions with
foreign governments. These include discussions with traditional allies like France,
Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia
and Japan, as well as with new partners such
as South Africa, Brazil and India. We have
also had a robust discussion with the Russian Federation on space security. Engaging
China on space security is extremely important, and we continue efforts to do so.
We have also been working with the European Union (EU) and like-minded nations to develop an International Code of
Conduct for Outer Space Activities. The
United States believes that a code of conduct would provide concrete benefits for
the long-term sustainability, security, safety
and stability of the space environment. For
example, a nonlegally binding code would
provide pragmatic, near-term solutions by
establishing guidelines for responsible behavior in space, in order to reduce the hazards of accidental and intentional debrisgenerating events and to increase
would create damaging consequences for
all of us.”
We are also actively engaged in the
Group of Governmental Experts on Outer
Space Transparency and Confidence
Building Measures (TCBMs) established
by U.N. General Assembly Resolution
65/68. The group’s purpose is to examine
options for establishing bilateral and multilateral TCBMs that support the longterm sustainability and security of the
space environment. Representatives from
15 nations, including the United States,
serve on this panel, whose objective is to
As directed by the president’s 2010 National Space Policy,
the United States is pursuing a comprehensive approach
in responding to the challenges in the space environment.
transparency of space operations for collision avoidance. As noted by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in announcing the U.S. decision in January
2012 to join with the EU and other nations
to develop a code: “The long-term sustainability of our space environment is at serious risk from space debris and irresponsible actors. … Unless the international
community addresses these challenges,
the environment around our planet will
become increasingly hazardous to human
spaceflight and satellite systems, which
develop a consensus report that outlines a
set of pragmatic space TCBMs to which nations can voluntarily subscribe.
As president of the Group of Eight (G8) in 2012, the United States introduced
the topic of space sustainability and security into the G-8 agenda. We believe that
this body can play a useful role in highlighting the importance of space, and its
commitment will draw further attention to
the importance of ensuring space sustainability and security for future generations.
In its 2012 Foreign Ministers Statement,
the G-8 leaders committed to ensuring the
long-term sustainability, stability, safety
and security of space. In its statement on
nonproliferation, the G-8 discussed space
sustainability and security in detail, noting
that outer space activities play a significant
role in the social, economic, scientific and
technological development of states, as
well as in maintaining international peace
and security. The G-8 expressed concern
about the growth of orbital debris, which
presents an increasing threat to space activities, including human spaceflight and
satellite systems. Finally, it welcomed current efforts aimed at establishing a strong
international consensus on an International Code of Conduct for Outer Space
Activities. Under the presidency of the
United Kingdom in 2013, we expect to see
continued strong commitments to space
sustainability and security in the G-8.
At the multilateral level, we have expanded our engagement within the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful
Uses of Outer Space. Our focus is on the
development and adoption of international standards to minimize debris. In the
committee’s scientific and technical subcommittee, the United States is taking an
active role in the Working Group on the
Long-Term Sustainability of Space Activities. This will be a key forum for the international development of “best practices”
guidelines for space activities. The United
States is currently serving as the co-chair of
SEE ROSE PAGE 37
Make Way for a New Generation in Space
< ANDREA JAIME >
S
pace is an aging industry
that benefits from the
wealth of information
brought about by the decades of
experience of its current leaders.
It is also an industry that generally relies on verified “space
proven” methods over newer
untested technologies that harbor unknown risks. While the already proven methods and technologies are crucial in bringing
reliability to an inherently risky
industry, it is also important not
to ignore new and emerging
ideas and approaches.
In 1957, the successful launch
of Sputnik started the “space generation.” Those of us born after
that time have grown up surrounded by space technology,
and this has become an ingrained part in our daily lives.
The Apollo program arrived in
the 1960s, bringing the passion
for space a step further. Space became a “cooler” thing; it was a way
to measure the power, the determination and the progress of a
nation. There is indeed an “Apollo generation” inspired by this.
After the Apollo program, the
Space Race brought us to Mir
and the international space station (ISS), and it got stuck there.
Soyuz and the space shuttle were
the immediate results of this. The
shuttle inspired yet another generation —bringing people’s
dreams to outer space, to ISS.
And then the shuttle was retired,
with no replacement.
And here we are, a remaining
generation inspired by Sputnik,
Apollo, the shuttle and ISS.
However, we should take care
of the newcomers, those who live
in the “space generation” but
are losing track of it. National
space programs tried hard to
push for exploration beyond low
Earth orbit; we landed on Mars
and even went to the edge of our
solar system.
But it is not enough. There is
a lack of attraction among the
general public; the “wow effect”
that inspired the first generation
is gone, replaced by many other
things.
This “new generation” (we
have not found our name yet)
has the knowledge and the technology. So then what happens?
The world has evolved very fast,
faster than politics, law and some-
times society itself. Space, as I
mentioned, still relies on the
“space proven” methods, but the
world is moving faster, and if we
do not get into the rhythm, it will
pass. The space program will remain as a dream lost in the past
generations; the new ones will
settle into what we inherited and
we will live happily ever after, just
orbiting in a collapsed low Earth
orbit and geostationary orbit.
The lack of harmony between
the space programs and the
evolving world is a fact.
But there is another fact: the
existence of a very well prepared
young generation ready to take
the lead. This new generation is
already used to dancing at the velocity of this evolving world, and
has adapted to it several times.
“Adapt or die,” we say.
This new generation will need
to deal with two types of new challenges: adapting the space program to this fast-changing world
by bringing exciting new ideas
and developing revolutionary
technologies, while keeping it
safe to avoid losing its reliability;
and solving the new problems
that will remain including space
debris, spectrum allocation,
space sustainability, and planetary protection.
This new generation (let me
define it as those between 18 and
35 years old) is ready to take over
and move forward.
In the Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC), we are
aware of these challenges; we
know we are that generation that
needs to work on solving the gap;
and we are developing our strategy for it:
å Strengthening international relations. The beauty of space
is that it is the only common
place for humans; it belongs to
nobody and to all of us at the
same time. Space programs started as a national pride endeavor,
but there is a new path. This
roadmap is foreseen only with
the input of all nations, global
agreements, global understanding and pure cooperation. However, given that humans tend to
work better under stress, a little
bit of competition is welcomed.
But all in all, knowing your peers
is the only way to win. SGAC comprises people from more than
100 countries around the world;
the new generation learns from
others, respects other ways of
work and is able to soak up the
best of each one.
å Developing policy and legal
frameworks. It is important to
know the context. There is an immense gap between engineers
and scientists, and media and
policymakers. The young generation knows that technology is advancing so fast that the legal and
political frameworks are becoming obsolete even faster. This is
partially because the vast majority of policymakers are coming
from the previous generations.
SGAC works constantly to accomplish a key component of its mission: to be the dialogue agent between United Nations member
states present at the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of
Outer Space and the next generation of international space sector leaders.
å Studying the key space topics from an international point of
view and providing solutions.
This new generation is thirsty for
knowledge. Nowadays, it is a mat-
SEE JAIME PAGE 37
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April 8, 2013
MARKETPLACE
_________________________________
___________________________________
__________________________________
______________
_____________________________________________________
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SPACE NEWS
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Fax: 01-703-750-8913
ROSE FROM PAGE 35
the Expert Group on Space Debris, Space Operations, and
Space Situational Awareness,
demonstrating our commitment
to making progress in enhancing spaceflight safety and preserving the use of space for the
long term.
Finally, the United States has
greatly expanded cooperation
on space situational awareness.
Given the threat from space debris, we are working with international partners, both bilaterally
and multilaterally, to ensure that
we have robust situational awareness of the space environment.
Space situational awareness enables us to characterize the space
environment and to predict the
physical location of natural and
manmade objects orbiting the
Earth to assist in avoiding future
collisions in space. The State Department, in close collaboration
with the Department of Defense,
is engaged in technical exchanges with experts from
around the world to find ways to
cooperate on sharing space situational awareness information. To
date, U.S. Strategic Command
has concluded 35 space situa-
JAIME FROM PAGE 35
ter of a click on our smartphones
to get the immediate answer to a
question. We are no longer a generation that answers questions,
but a generation that asks them
(and eventually will find the solutions). We learned what has
been done in the past from the
previous generations, but now we
want to go further. Sometimes we
are not allowed to debate or discuss certain things because we
are criticized for a “lack of experience,” but the truth is that this
lack of experience makes us the
perfect outsiders to bring in new
ideas and perspectives.
å Bridging the gap between
proven and emerging ideas and
people in the space community.
There is a gap between those
Sputnik and Apollo generations
and this new generation. Some of
us have the privilege to attend
unique meetings and events with
decision-makers, and very often
we are the only person under 50
years old in the room. Attendance to conferences and business trips is often reserved for
those higher up in a company
(especially under budget constrains). This is not the way to
merge the generations. The
philosopher Confucius highlighted this centuries ago: “I hear
and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
SGAC is giving scholarships to
young professionals and students
to attend such events and meetings, and we even organize our
own, like the Space Generation
Fusion Forum with the National
Space Symposium and the Space
Generation Congress with the International Astronautical Congress. By exposing our members
to established professionals and
tional awareness sharing agreements with commercial satellite
owner/operators, and will soon
sign the first agreement with another government. This cooperation is essential to enable satellite
owners and operators to have the
information necessary to prevent
collisions in the future.
To conclude, as directed by
the president’s 2010 National
Space Policy, the United States is
pursuing a comprehensive approach in responding to the challenges in the space environment.
This response includes “topdown” political elements like efforts to develop a nonlegally
binding international code of
conduct, and “bottom-up” technical elements like the work on
long-term sustainability being
conducted by the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. However, the ultimate
objective of all these various efforts is the same — to reverse the
troubling trends that are damaging our space environment and
to preserve the limitless benefits
and promise of space for all nations and future generations.
Frank A. Rose is U.S. deputy assistant
secretary of state.
organizations in the space community, we aim to assist in getting
students and young professionals
“space proven.” Simultaneously,
we strive to ensure that the established space community is exposed to the opinions of our
members on space issues, in order to make sure that newer ideas
and approaches are considered
as well as traditional ones.
å Promoting education and
outreach. Finally, this generation
is used to new ways of communication that were invented less than
20 years ago and have become a
great part of our daily lives. Social
media, for example, are stronger
than we ever thought, showing the
power of rapid communication.
We live in a society that will not
stop to read a long article. People
have so much information passing
through their eyes that only those
with an immediate “wow effect”
will remain in the brain of the
reader. Visual media are stronger
than ever, and space has a winning
ticket in its hand. Can you think of
anything with more beauty than a
picture of outer space? This new
generation knows how to communicate and what the society wants
to be communicated.
Let’s face it, the “new generation” is looking for a name, and it
is a task for all of us to find it —
and rather soon, if we do not
want to miss the rhythm of our
rapidly evolving world.
Andrea Jaime is executive director of the Space
Generation Advisory Council, a global, nongovernmental organization and network that
aims to represent university students and young
space professionals to the United Nations,
space agencies, industry and academia. If you
are interested in collaborating or contributing
to our mission of assisting and representing the
next generation of space leaders, please visit
our website at www.spacegeneration.org.
Horizon
On The
37
April 8, 2013
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38
April 8, 2013
PROFILE
Richard F. Ambrose
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, LOCKHEED MARTIN SPACE SYSTEMS
F
ollowing an impressive string of successes during the competitive phase
of the U.S. government’s satellite
fleet recapitalization effort, Lockheed Martin Space Systems finds itself in the position
of unofficial guardian of the so-called programs of record.
Many of these programs, including the
Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) for
missile warning and the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) secure
communications satellites, represent nonnegotiable national security capabilities
and thus are relatively safe even in an era of
declining federal budgets.
But even AEHF and SBIRS are not necessarily immune from the across-the-board
budget cuts known as the sequester, whose
bite out of U.S. Defense Department
spending this year is about 8 percent. Cuts
of that magnitude could force production
delays on some programs barring a congressionally approved reprogramming of
funds.
Longer term, the U.S. Air Force is examining alternative approaches to fielding
space capabilities, such as disaggregation,
which refers to breaking up the payload
sets on large satellites and flying them separately on smaller craft. One of the missions frequently mentioned in disaggregation discussions is AEHF, whose payload
supplier, Northrop Grumman, is keen to
make some of that system’s capabilities
available as a separate offering.
Rick Ambrose, who took charge of Lockheed Martin’s space business early this year,
says he’d prefer to stay the current course on
How is sequestration affecting your portfolio?
We’re not making any changes until we actually see which
programs will be affected and what direction will come
from customers. Now with that said, we are doing everything we can to reduce costs and be more efficient on the
program execution.
Can you give me an example?
We’ve been really driving infrastructure costs down. By 2016
we’ll have taken out 1.5 million square feet [about 140,000
square meters]. We’re getting more productive, more automation in our systems, so that saves about $30 million a year.
In Sunnyvale, Calif., there’s one building we’ll have idle
this year; we consolidated because we’re getting more efficient, so we don’t need the space and we’ll dispose of that
building at the right time. We’ve probably taken out over
$300 million in overhead in the last three years.
As programs mature and we move into production we
streamline processes, like with SBIRS. Now that you’re in
this production run, you can do those things because we’re
through the tough development part of the programs.
Is Lockheed Martin Space Systems stable in terms of employment?
In general, our forecast is to be pretty stable. Pretty flat —
we call it flat-ish — barring any sequestration move or major program change.
We’re always dealing with specific skill mix issues. We’re
moving to more production and it’s real important that we
have work and retain that critical development staff. We’re
trying to drive that through innovation.
First-tier innovation is around affordability and driving
our recurring costs down and second-tier innovation
would be mission enhancements as we work with the various customers.
What keeps a talented engineer around as programs move from
development to production?
What’s really interesting is our planetary work. We’re
about ready to deliver the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph vehicle, which is a solar mission that’s going to
launch on a Pegasus. And the beauty of those is their very
fast cycle. So with two-, three-year cycles, we can have young
engineers get the full spectrum from design, development
to launch experience very quickly.
There’s still a lot of demand in our national systems like
the SBIRS and AEHF as we look at maintaining that critical capability yet drive affordability. It usually means looking at the designs a little differently to keep them engaged.
SPACENEWS PHOTO BY THOMAS BROWN
Protecting the Franchise
programs like AEHF, but that the company
is prepared to compete should the Air Force
take things in a different direction. He also
said Lockheed Martin is finding cost-saving
Your predecessor expressed concerns about the health of your
supply chain. What’s your assessment?
There’s still a concern. We see a lot of movement: acquisition and mergers; some suppliers just outright relocate
some of their operations and then we worry about the
skills. So we have hundreds of people deployed throughout the supply chain — technical, business and subcontracts people to assure delivery and do early detection
when there’s stress in the supply chain.
There are cases where we’ve gone in with a competitor
and shored up a company on low-level parts like isolators.
Boeing has GPS 2F, we have GPS 3, so we’re actually
teamed up. We had some issues so we jointly went out and
worked a second source, so now we have two sources.
What are your thoughts about disaggregating AEHF?
I would say that we would have to execute the AEHF program, make sure we do not gap that critical protected communications capability.
I did see that our partner has offered up lower-cost alternatives and I do look forward to them giving me that
cost advantage as I negotiate the follow-on satellites. If they
can do 80 percent of the mission at such a low cost, then I
look forward to getting my phone call with a price reduction on my core program. You’ve got to have a little fun
with this, too.
We want to honor our partnerships obviously because of
the mission importance, but once the government makes a
decision which path they’re going to go, we’re going to
compete and we’re going to compete very aggressively.
Can Lockheed Martin build protected communications payloads?
efficiencies as its big programs move from
development to production.
Ambrose spoke recently with SpaceNews
editor Warren Ferster.
we had the right focus, not just in commercial satellites
but in any type of commercial opportunities. We do have
bids in and we’re looking at other competitions that are
coming up.
We have every intention of competing but we’re going to be selective based on where we can add differential value. We want to go after programs where there’s
some strong technology needed in the communications
side. Some procurements play to our strengths and other ones don’t.
Have you set goals for the number of commercial satellite orders
you’d like to win each year?
I’d say two or three per year is what we’d like to see. We still
want to be selective but we see a major move in the commercial market with some of the push to Ka-band services.
That creates opportunities.
What are your overall expectations for the business over the
next five years?
I’ll give you three. The next three years we’ve forecast relatively flat-ish. We are going to be driving on some new opportunities to enhance the portfolio.
In missile defense we clearly see demand for the
Theater High Altitude Area Defense system and international opportunities in the Middle East and Asia, and
then we’re pushing some of the commercial satellite
opportunities.
Do you view missile defense as a growth area?
Absolutely. We’d probably prefer to maintain the current
path but if the government disaggregates, we’ll make the
shift we need to make.
I want to be careful about characterizing growth. With a
big portfolio things are up and down — that’s why we say
flat-ish. But if you look at the world right now and look at
world events, clearly a lot of folks are interested in missile
defense around the globe.
What are your expectations for the Athena small rocket, which you
brought back to the market a few years ago but have yet to sell?
What percentage of your portfolio would you say is missile defense related?
We only see one or two potential sales a year on average
and it doesn’t cost us a whole lot to sustain where we’re at
right now. The beauty of the breadth and depth of the
space organization here is we can flex to those kinds of
things back and forth across our different programs.
If you bunch strategic missiles and missile defense together, it’s probably about 20 percent.
With government spending declining, are you redoubling efforts
to win commercial satellite contracts?
Last year we stood up commercial ventures to make sure
How is the rest of your portfolio divided?
We blend it in three ways. Strategic missiles is there at
20 percent; then we do national security space; and
then we do what we call civil. So civil would probably be
about 25 percent and then the remainder is national security space.
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