Frank DeMauro. Credit: Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems
PARIS — Northrop Grumman’s purchase of Orbital ATK in 2018 raised the question: What does Northrop want to do with the commercial space business that came along with the sale?
The deal occurred in the teeth of a sharp downturn in commercial satellite sales industry-wide, and a Pentagon prime contractor like Northrop was never going to be impressed by the thin operating margins in that business.
But the new Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems division has plans for the commercial space sector and Orbital’s GEOStar line of commercial telecommunications satellite platforms. A recent two-satellite win from Space Norway was a reminder to the market that the Orbital heritage has not been shelved.
On a related track, Northrop-owned SpaceLogistics LLC is about to pioneer an effort to refuel aging but otherwise healthy large geostationary-orbit telecommunications satellites. The first launch is scheduled aboard an International Launch Services Russian Proton rocket within two weeks.
Frank DeMauro, vice president and general manager of the Space Systems Division; and Joseph Anderson, vice president of operations and business development at SpaceLogistics, discussed the company’s positioning in the commercial market, and why they were attending Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week here.
Small geostationary satellites are in fashion. Boeing, Thales, Maxar and Airbus are offering small-GEO platforms . What is Northrop Grumman doing to stay competitive?
DeMauro: It’s going to remain an area in which we still stay focused. The GEOStar platform originally was for payloads of less than a kilowatt of power. Over the years we’ve evolved that capability, up to and including our GEOStar-3 platform to accommodate payloads in the neighborhood of 8 kW, and the first of those was launched early last year and it’s performing extremely well.
GEOStar-3 is the basis on which a lot of our current opportunities will be bid. It’s reliable, it has a lot of heritage and we think it will remain attractive to operators for years to come. It’s flexible, we can do a dual-launch configuration with that platform, so we can reduce launch costs for the operators. The payload power it offers is attractive to a lot of the customers, particularly those replacing existing assets that may be coming to their end-of-life. Our plan is to continue to offer a range of capabilities from the smaller size to what we refer to as the medium-size platform, which we think GEOStar-3 is. We think our approach is cost effective, not only from the price of the spacecraft but the ability to do multiple satellites on a single launch, so we intend to remain in that market with that platform.
How do you see the market shaping up for small GEO in the near- to mid-term?
DeMauro: It has been very slow. We see the market rebounding an already this year. I think there have been 11 [GEO-orbit satellite] awards. We’re almost at the end of the year but there could be others. While we may not see a rebound to where we were when people were ordering 25 satellites a year, we don’t think it’s going to remain as it had been the past couple years. We see a modest rebound of the market. We think there’s a place for the GEOstar platform to play, and not only as a bent-pipe payload provider. We can also accommodate processed payloads on that platform. GEOStar could become a building block to additional platforms that might be smaller and have a shorter life, but are more attuned to what some of the customers are looking for in terms of smaller, more flexible satellites.
What products or services does Northrop Grumman think are best suited for today’s commercial market? 
DeMauro: If you start at the component level, we have a components business unit that does solar arrays and structures, propellant tanks and thermal systems, which we sell as a merchant supplier. Not only are we vertically integrated, but we also sell satellite systems in which we integrate those vertically integrated products. Other products we procure around the world to support not only our bus platforms but the payloads we offer. We’re able to provide those systems, and we’re also able to provide satellite servicing offerings as part of our SpaceLogistics business.
Inaugural commercial space-refueling mission for Intelsat launch launches Sept. 30, second-generation system to launch in 2020
Anderson: We see a lot of interest in our satellite servicing. It’s a new market. We have just shipped to the launch base our first-of-a-kind Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1). We’re looking at Sept. 30 as our launch date for the first MEV. That MEV will rendezvous and dock with an Intelsat satellite in January, the IS-901 spacecraft. This is our customer base: not only are we selling new satellites, we’re also selling satellite services.
Joseph Anderson. Credit: Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems
A year or so ago we introduced our next-generation of life-extension products as well. We call them Mission Extension pods. We’ve got a couple of term sheets in place for those now — customers interested in procuring those services — and part of that is a robotic vehicle that will be able to perform other types of services in orbit, such as simple repair missions. We see moving beyond just the life extension product to other types of satellite augmentation.
GEO operators seem to be trending away from extending the life of satellites in orbit.  
Anderson: You see a wide spectrum of interest out there. We see quite a bit of interest in life extension because they’ve been waiting on doing their replacements and so now they’re looking for, “How do I continue to extend that delay while we’re waiting for that next generation of technology to come out before we do the investment, waiting to see if LEO markets evolve that will influence GEO demand.” One of the new things emerging is smaller, flexible spacecraft. [Customers are] looking to adapt to their marketplaces quickly, and satellite servicing is another method to provide that. In our next-generation satellites that I’m working with Frank’s team on including things like power-data adapters, so we can change the payload over time. You could still go with a long-life spacecraft bus but interchange payloads as another way to achieve the same basic interests.
Has the U.S. government committed to any launches? 
Anderson: MEV-1 is booked for the first five years with Intelsat. We are launching MEV-2 in the spring of next year. Again, Intelsat is the first user of that asset. The U.S. government is picking up interest and we are talking to them about potential services. I don’t know how much more I can say about that at this point, but there is definitely an interest and you can see in some of their procurements that are coming out now, they are looking at prototypes to demonstrate in-orbit servicing and so I do see it working its way into their architecture more in the future.
There are a lot of firsts there – we had to change the whole regulatory environment for that as well. In the U.S. we have agencies for regulating GEO comsats, agencies for regulating Earth observation satellites. And EMV is quite different from either one of those. So we had to work through the process, the State Department, the FCC, and NOAA together to figure out how to license it. And so we did that, we are fully licensed, the FCC will be our oversight agency from an Outer Space Treaty perspective, but we also have a license with NOAA to license our imager; to do the rendezvous with our clients, we have imaging payloads. So we worked out a method for doing that. Likewise, insurance – this type of product has never been ensured before, being a commercial business, we did work with the underwriters and our broker and we developed new loss formulas, new ways to insure this product. So we’ve got our launch plus one year insurance established, so we’re ready to go here a month from now.
DeMauro: When you couple that with the technical challenges of rendezvousing two vehicles in space, it’s something we now do on a regular basis in LEO, with the Space Station and our Cygnus vehicle, but it’s a different environment in GEO. The client is very different, with different vehicles for almost every docking. So we needed to develop a rendezvous and docking system that was flexible enough to be able to support that. Validating it on the ground and in a few short months we’ll have the exciting day of the first rendezvous.
Does this capability have the potential for orbital debris removal?
Anderson: There is limited potential. The vehicle is designed for docking to satellites that are stable. Most orbital debris would probably be more tumbling. It would be difficult for our initial MEVs to do that. Our next generation system with the robotics, the mission robotic vehicle that would install these pods I mentioned, that has more potential for capturing that debris and removing it out to the graveyard orbit. We are focused today on the GEO belt, the GEO market, that is where the main market is. Broader active debris removal really requires a customer, who’s going to pay for the debris removal. That’s the challenge for a commercial business like SpaceLogistics is finding that customer. Clearly the things we are developing will enable us to achieve that when there is a commercial market to do that, – and we can do that in any obit, not just GEO. So we are developing those capabilities.
Space Norway: HEO broadband with payloads for Inmarsat, US Air Force as well. Credit: Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems
DeMauro: The main thing for us is trying to be as responsive as we can to what the customer is looking for. If they are looking for a replacement spacecraft, when they’re in our class of satellite, we think we have an extremely competitive offering. When they’re looking to extend the life of on-orbit assets, we’ve got the SpaceLogistics business to provide that. In looking to the future, in terms of the flexible payloads, we’re looking at how we can support that market based off the products that we currently offer.
You recently won a contract with Space Norway for two broadband satellites that will carry three payloads each and operate over the poles in an unusual, highly elliptical (HEO) orbit. What advantages did Northrop bring to the competition?
DeMauro: It’s a procurement we are extremely proud to take part in. We’ll be providing the spacecraft platform, integrating part of the payload on our own to the specifications of the customer, procuring the hardware, assembling the payload and testing it. We’ll also be integrating other payloads that were procured separately, one of which is going to be built by Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems – a payload procured by the U.S. Air Force. It will essentially be delivered by the customer to us, even though it’s made by a sister sector. Then the Missions System sector part of Northrop Grumman will build part of the ground system for the spacecraft. Those procurements were all done separately.
One of the benefits we think Space Norway saw in having a single Northrop Grumman solution was the clear interfaces that we’ll have, managerially, across the company. We’re the prime integrator, we’ll get that payload for the U.S. Air Force mission delivered to us, we’ve got other payload components delivered to us, we’ll integrate it together and we’ll deliver a system to the customer. We think the GEOStar platform that we offered was the most competitive out there, so we think on its own it was an attractive offering. But when we coupled together the other parts of the scope from the other pieces of Northrop, we think it made it that much more attractive. The other aspect we think we offered that made it attractive was the dual launch configuration that we can fly in.
What are the upcoming milestones for the project?
DeMauro: We kicked that program off in July, and so far it’s going very well. We’ll have our preliminary design review in the early part of next year. Hardware is in procurement to support the build of the bus and the payloads.
Will the mission require modifications to the GEOStar-3 platform?
DeMauro: The only modification we have to make to the platform itself is to support the HEO orbit. The primary drivers are the attitude control system to fly in a different orbit and then there are some environmental differences in that orbit vs. GEO. We don’t see those as significant developments but they are updates to the platform that they will be making.