The European Union, its earlier space-conduct proposal rejected, now trying softer, bottom-up approach
Carine Claeys. Credit: European Commission
LUXEMBOURG — The European Union is taking a much softer approach to building consensus on global conduct in space following the failure of its Rules of the Road proposal to win support of developing nations.
Four years after the EU effort failed to win international support despite years of effort, the EU this time around is favoring discussion and dialogue in a “bottom-up” approach as opposed to the top-down strategy that was rejected.
It was never exactly clear what developing nations did not like about the Rules of the Road, a benign, no-commitment document that on its face should bother no one.
But in hindsight, the EU now sees that its approach was considered insufficiently inclusive in presenting a document that was explained to developing nations as already a near-final text, not amenable to editing.
The EU’s Rules of the Road experience offers lessons in how difficult it will be to build a global consensus that is strong enough to include binding regulations to prohibit certain types of behavior, such as the willful destruction of satellites in orbit.
India’s mobile anti-satellite missile test earlier this year, in which an Indian satellite with the intention of being an eventual test target was destroyed, is an example of how reticent governments are to criticize these kinds of activities.
Even now, as it become clear that the debris created by India’s anti satellite missile test was propelled into higher orbits than foreseen and will take much longer than promised to reenter the atmosphere, India has faced little formal government protest.
The U.S. State Department was muted in its response, a fact that India used to defend its behavior: http://bit.ly/2yEgPZa
Mindful of what happened in 2015, the EU’s European External Action Service (EEAS) has begun an effort to win friends and influence governments on a consensual, informal basis only.
Carine Claeys, head of the EEAS Space Task Force, said the new, even-softer-power method likely will take longer to reach its intended end, but that it will avoid the surprises of the previous effort.
Claeys said the task force is leaning heavily on the 21 Long-Term Sustainable (LTS) space development goals agreed to in June by the Scientific and Technical Committee of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Users of Outer Space: https://undocs.org/A/AC.105/C.1/L.366
“There are lessons that have to be learned from the failure of the international CoC,” Claeys said here Nov. 14 at the NewSpace Europe conference, referring to the Code of Conduct.
“For the principles in the document there was quite a broad support and agreement. However, there are two main lessons. First, it was not done within the UN context, and if something would happen from the top down level it should start in the UN framework.
“The second lesson was that it was not inclusive. It was initiated by the European Union and like-minded countries. The EU was not alone but nevertheless it was very Western, if I may say so.
None of the non-aligned counties or countries more to the East were involved, and the like-minded EU and other actors were not ready to change a lot of the text they had taken some time to negotiate, and where the balance had been difficult to achieve.
“If you go to third countries and tell them: ‘This is our text, please don’t change more than one or two commas,’ it’s rather difficult to get them on.”
Claeys said the current public diplomacy effort has no text associated with it, but is limited to raising the issues in hopes of building a consensus around language that any future text will need to incorporate.
“We want to invite the relevant people to work on concrete norms, standards, guidelines, rules of the game, rules of the road. For this we count on the technical people, those who know what it is about more than the diplomats. This is linked to the 21 guidelines.
“It is important for the EU and the EU member states to say what they would do to implement these 21 guidelines.
“In the working group that is being established under the Scientific and Technical subcommittee of COPUOS, we will encourage our member states and third parties to share experience, share best practices and share the way they are implementing those LTS guidelines in the global community. Not only in Europe, but in the global community this is very important.”
Once this has happened, and it could take years, “we could, in a totally inclusive manner, think again about a political commitment being added to what comes from the bottom up,” Claeys said.
“In the medium term I think this will be in the form of a voluntary instrument. In the longer term: Who knows? But let’s be optimistic and say it’s a legally binding instrument. But that will take time.”
In China, $1.42 billion in NewSpace commercial space financings by 200 venture-capital investors since 2015
Zhijian Wu, chairman, China Space Foundation. Space Intel Report photo
LUXEMBOURG — Some 200 Chinese venture-capital companies have funded more than 150 Chinese New Space startups that run the gamut from launch-service providers, satellite builders, geospatial-imagery and data sales companies, according to the China Space Foundation and VC FutureAerospace.
As is the case in the United States, China’s NewSpace sector has climbed a wall of worry that it’s in a bubble that will end badly for many of these companies and their backers.
Rita Zhang, vice president, portfolio management and international affairs, FutureAerospace. Space Intel Report photo
For for Rita Zhang, vice president of portfolio management and international affairs at FutureAerospace, a venture capital investor, the valuations of some of these startups is out of proportion to their business prospects.
“I see a lot of companies that raise irrationally high valuations that do not have a business model,” Zhang said here Nov. 13 at the NewSpace Europe conference. “The high valuation is not sustainable if you cannot support it with a sold business case or solid revenue.
“It is critical for these companies to justify their business models quickly and to have a viable business case to be sustainable. Revenue generation, not high valuation, is the key.”
Judging from the reaction of some in the audience, the fact that China has its own startup culture not tied to the Chinese government is still news.
Zhang understood this.
“The rest of the world doesn’t have a clue about what is happening in China, she said. FutureAerospace was created in 2015 and was, according to Zhang, China’s first space-dedicated VC.
Shown here is China’s venture capital investment in satellite companies, by category and by financing round.On the Y axis are the four categories. From top: Satellite manufacturing, launch services, satellite operations and satellite applications. The X axis separates the funding, which totals more than 10 billion yuan ($1.42 billion), by financing round. From left: Seed, angel, Pre-A, A, A-Plus, B and B+. Credit: China Space Foundation
Lots has happened since then. The takeoff moment was 2014, when the Chinese government issued a decree allowing private companies to build and launch satellites: http://bit.ly/2JAEnFT
Zhijian Wu, chairman of the China Space Foundation, a non-profit, said 13 of the 39 space launches on Chinese rockets in 2018 were at least partly for commercial interests. He said China now counts 44 companies that operate at least one satellite and provide bandwidth or data or images to customers.
Commercial Chinese satellite manufacturers have launched more than 30 satellites weighing between 10 and 500 kilograms.
Private-sector Chinese launchers have had mixed results in their debut missions, but a half-dozen exist and one, LandSpace, has developed its own LOX/methane engine. “It has become one of the few private companies with sufficient research and design capability to do this,” Wu said.
China Space Foundation figures show more than 10 billion yuan ($1.42 billion) has been invested into the NewSpace sector since 2015. “The rapid development of the private space sector cannot be separate from the availability of capital,” he said.
Whether China really wants much space collaboration with non-Chinese companies, and what intellectual property protections would govern it, remains a subject of debate.
Wu said the Chinese government in June issued a catalogue listing areas of space technology in which the government would welcome foreign investment, including satellite payload design.
Zhang said that similar to what has happened in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe and Asia, more capital has flowed into upstream sectors including launch vehicles and satellite manufacturing despite the historically low margins of these businesses.
“Most money goes into the upstream,” she said. “But actually the downstream has higher margins. So we see vertical integration as companies move down the industrial chain.”
The FutureAerospace Industrial Fund works with local governments to invest in a wide variety of commercial including satellite TT&C, satellite communications and financial services.
OHB satellite business doing well, rocket division less so; multiple ESA ITTs stress Europe’s supply chain
Credit: OHB SE
LUXEMBOURG — Satellite and rocket hardware builder OHB SE reported increased revenue and profit for the nine months ending Sept. 30 despite headwinds as its Ariane rocket division manages the rough transition from the Ariane 5 to the Ariane 6 rocket.
It is a problem that is not going away as Ariane 5 heads toward retirement and its replacement, the lower-cost Ariane 6, enters an uncertain market. Its inaugural flight is scheduled for late 2020.
OHB, through its Aerospace and Industrial Products division, has an 11% share of the Ariane 6 work.
“We are on schedule and on budget,” OHB Chief Executive Marco R. Fuchs said of the company’s Ariane 6 contracts. “The overall market is something that [European launch-service provider] Arianespace is working on. Of course it’s very competitive. There is price pressure, and new players.
“Ariane 6 has to prove that it is as good as we all hope it will be. As a supplier, noting has changed. Our contractual agreements are the same as negotiated some time ago. We are hopeful that the ramp up on the market happens as planned, but as a supplier we are really not in control of that.”
Arianespace has ordered the first batch of 14 Ariane 6 vehicles from prime contractor ArianeGroup, which is OHB’s customer.
Because it is unclear what the market’s response to it will be — particularly given the tumult in the traditional geostationary-orbit satellite sector — Ariane 6 is being ordered more slowly than what contractors like OHB had hoped. That, plus Ariane 6’s lower-cost design, is making the transition from Ariane 5 more difficult for its manufacturers.
OHB’s satellite business, based on European government programs, is doing well. But the Aerospace and Industrial Products division is where the work on the Ariane rocket work is done. The transition from Ariane 5 to Ariane 6 was never going to be easy. How difficult it will turn out to be won’t be known for another year or two. Credit: OHB SE
“We have significant volume decreases,” Fuchs said of the transition’s effect on MT Aerospace, the division that does the work. “We had something like 11,000 production hours on a shipset of Ariane 5. Now we have 7,000 production hours on Ariane 6.”
OHB SE as a whole reported an EBITDA of 8.8% of revenue, which was up 3.9%, to 659 million euros ($735 million), for the nine months ending Sept. 30.
The Aerospace and Industrial Products division, which includes Ariane rocket component builder MT Aerospace, reported a 7% drop in revenue, to 130.8 million euros and an EBITDA margin of 9.6%, down from 11.1% last year.
“The goal is to make MT less dependent on the Ariane business,” Fuchs said. “It used to be a very high percentage — two thirds. Soon we will have one-third. This is part of the healthy evolution of MT Aerospace.”
OHB’s current largest programs are as prime contractor for Europe’s Galileo positioning, navigation and timing satellites; prime contractor for the six-satellite Meteosat Third Generation meteorological spacecraft; and prime for the three-satellite SARah radar reconnaissance mission for the German military. Airbus Defence and Space is building one of the three SARah satellites.
OHB, and the entire European space-hardware sector, is looking to the Nov. 27-28 conference of European Space Agency (ESA) governments to approve multiple new programs. OHB will be bidding either as prime contractor or as part of a team.
Multiple ESA bid requests putting stress on supply chain
Like the other two European space system prime contractors, Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space, OHB is struggling to manage as many as 10 simultaneous invitations to tender from the 22-nation ESA.
The competitions, for Earth observation and exploration programs, have put strains on Europe’s space-contracting ecosystem. It’s particularly difficult for smaller companies, insofar as the ESA tenders require them to deliver priced bids to the prime contractors, which then include them in their bids.
Industry officials said they have never seen so many bid requests coming at the same time.
A small- or medium-size subcontractor will be hard-pressed to handle the wave of bids now facing deadlines. Officials from Airbus, OHB and Thales Alenia Space said it’s not the programs’ production schedule that is the problem — the actual development is stretched out — but the densely packed deadlines for the bids.
Some of these contractors are the sole European suppliers of a given piece of equipment.
Rocket Factory Augsburg AG: OHB’s small-launcher pitch
OHB is a family-owned company. The Fuchs Family Pool has 69.72% of the equity, which gives it the luxury of investing in what might be considered risky ventures without much shareholder blowback.
So it is with Rocket Factory Augsburg AG (RFA), OHB’s small-satellite launcher initiative. Established in 2018, the company now has more than 50 employees designing a rocket to carry a 200-kilogram payload into low Earth orbit. The company is among those bidding for selection by the government of Portugal to operate from the Azores.
“Initial tests of major subsystems have already been successfully completed,” OHB said in a statement to investors. “To market the rocket, RFA can also draw on the resources of the OHB Group, which in OHB Cosmos has a company specializing in this area. Given the expected rise in demand for the transportation of small payloads, the future market prospects for a mini launcher are positive, especially as the OHB Group itself develops and builds such small satellites at several locations.”
Fuchs explained the venture this way:
“We believe in the market for micro launchers. We have our own assessment of the demand. We have always been a space company, not a satellite company.”
LEO satellite constellations seen as a cyber security threat in vulnerable offshore industries
Joel Scanlan. Credit: ABC
WASHINGTON – The arrival of reliable, high-speed broadband from low-orbiting satellite constellations could lead to an increase in cyberattacks on ill-prepared industries seeking to adopt the new connectivity services.
The offshore mining and maritime industries are especially vulnerable, said Joel Scanlan, a lecturer at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, because they are geographically dispersed, lack reliable and fast web access today and rely largely on legacy software with poor security.
For maritime in particular, “there is a great business case to connect and monitor these vessels worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars remotely, but they weren’t designed to be connected, and they often run code that is not particularly secure,” Scanlan said Oct. 25 during the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here.
For now, these industries make use of high-latency, low-bandwidth satellite connections in LEO and GEO for non-mission-critical tasks. But both the off-shore and maritime sectors are expected to transition to shore-based control and increased automation of shipboard systems when a spate of new broadband constellations proposed by SpaceX, OneWeb and Telesat are scheduled to come on line in the next few years.
“Boats are still made with USB ports, and this is how malware gets in, with sailors charging their phones in the navigation system of the ship,” Scanlan said.
“Five years ago there was no connection at all. As an industry, maritime is not really ready, and yet they want to rapidly adopt the new LEO constellations.”
As an example of the challenges the maritime industry could face, Scanlan highlighted a June 2017 cyberattack that crippled Danish shipping giant Maersk. Dubbed “Petya,” the attack shut down information technology systems across multiple sites and business units.
“The biggest shipping company in the world, and every single server, the shore-based operations were all completely taken over by ransomware,” he said. “Happily, it didn’t affect any vessels because they weren’t connected. But jump to 2022-23, and can we say the same thing?”
As a result of the Maersk attack and other cyber incidents, the shipping industry has become more aware of the threat posed to its connected systems. To mitigate the potential consequences, a group of international shipping organizations has developed guidelines aimed at assisting companies in formulating their own approach to cyber risk management onboard ships. A compliance framework is in the works, but Scanlan said it is not expected to be in force before 2021.
“The vast bulk of this, while a good response, is very much in the context of the current systems and the current levels of network connectivity,” he said. “What is about to occur is a rapid paradigm shift in internet access, and not so much the status-quo rate of change.”
He said ill-prepared industries will not be agile enough to respond in time to changes that new global high-speed broadband will bring to onboard network security.
A crewmember’s smartphone plugged into the ship’s console is the kind of thing the maritme industry wants to avoid. Credit: Joel Scanlan
“I don’t know how broadly people truly understand what the impact of Starlink plus OneWeb could have, one to three years from now,” he said, referring to SpaceX’s proposed constellation of thousands of small internet satellites in LEO alongside OneWeb’s planned network of several hundred broadband spacecraft.
“The industry may rapidly take on the new technology, as that will be fairly cheap and easy, but the existing systems and existing educational level about cyber risk is a bigger problem that will take longer to alter,” he said.
In a 2018 maritime cybersecurity survey conducted by Jones Walker LLP, nearly two in five companies experienced an attempted or successful data breach in the preceding year. The survey, which polled 126 senior executives, technology officers and managers across the U.S. shipping industry, found that only a minority of companies have participated in government and industry initiatives designed to mitigate the risk of a cyberattack.
But while higher bandwidth and more interconnected systems will no doubt increase the level of risk to maritime and other offshore operations, Scanlan says some sectors have managed the transition.
“Migrating servers to the cloud, for example, changed the risk profile; many companies were fine, but we do also see a lot more data breaches these days than previously,” owing to multiple factors in addition to cloud computing, he said.
The threat of cyberattack to the aeronautical sector, while less immediate, is another example of an industry mitigating risk, though Scanlan said few parallels can be drawn between ships and aircraft.
“Cockpits in planes have duplicate controls to the implementation of duplicate controls that in a bridge on a ship are very different,” he said. “In aircraft they are truly redundant systems, but I have been on ships where they were merely copies and shared some resources, and thus were not truly redundant.”
Much of the risk for any vessel, whether airborne or at sea, stems primarily from the crew and how well it is trained to avoid introducing malware into onboard systems via USB drives, mobile phones or other connected devices.
“This, to my knowledge, has not been seen as much of an issue in aircraft, but several weeks or months at sea is very different to hours on a plane,” he said. “If SpaceX really does sell their antenna for ~$100 as has been suggested, the prospect of a crew member buying and setting up onboard is very real on a boat, but not a problem a plane would face.”
As U.S. C-band auction proposal nears home stretch, Eutelsat proposes new formula for dividing the proceeds
Credit: FCC
PARIS — Eutelsat told U.S. regulators that the proposed auction of satellite C-band spectrum should return “up to 50%” of its proceeds to the U.S. Treasury, with the rest being distributed to the C-band satellite operators based on a formula that has been rejected by the C-Band Alliance.
Instead of dividing the proceeds based on 2017 C-band revenue in the United States, as the CBA has proposed, Eutelsat would employ a more complex formula that takes into account the amount of capacity each operator has in orbit and the age of its satellites, regardless of whether this capacity has any customers.
In a Nov. 7 letter summarizing its Nov. 5 meeting with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Eutelsat says the CBA’s formula “would introduce unnecessary legal risk.”
“[R]regardless of revenue from CONUS C-band customers, C-band satellite operators are relinquishing spectrum, will face a fundamental change to their authorizations, and have made sunk capital investments in satellite capacity to serve the United States, which they will be required to abandon if the Commission moves forward with this transition,” Eutelsat said.
Here’s how Eutelsat proposes to divvy up the proceeds from an auction of C-band spectrum. With a younger fleet, Eutelsat would stand to benefit from this formula compared to the C-Band Alliance’s proposal to base distribution on 2017 revenue from each operator’s U.S. C-band business.
Industry estimates are that Intelsat and SES together generate a bit more than 90% of the satellite revenue from C-band business in the United States, with Eutelsat and Telesat dividing the rest.
For Eutelsat, abandoning rights to spectrum to which each operator has equal access should be compensated regardless of whether the operator is managing much of a business. The investment counts, too, not just the revenue, according to Eutelsat.
Eutelsat’s fleet over the Americas is younger than the other CBA members, and weighting newer satellites more than older ones also would produce a more favorable outcome.
Eutelsat left the CBA in September, citing numerous issues including an undefined complaint about the proposed revenue share — which CBA members said Eutelsat had agreed to, in writing, before it changed its mind.
Eutelsat: The U.S. Treasury get up to 50% of the C-band auction proceeds
Another issue Eutelsat raised to this FCC, this time in an October meeting, was that the “voluntary contribution” to the U.S. Treasury not exceed 50% of the proceeds, which most observers believe will total at least several billion dollars as 5G terrestrial operators seek mid-band spectrum for their network deployments.
Intelsat Chief Executive Steve Spengler told an investor call that he had never heard the 50% figure being raised and could not explain its origin.
The Eutelsat Nov. 7 letter suggests that Eutelsat itself is the source for the 50% figure.
The CBA has said that clearing 300 MHz of the 500 MHz now allocated to satellite transmissions between 3.7 and 4.2 GHz would cost about $3 billion in launching eight new satellites, financing the introduction by broadcasters of new signal-compression techniques and installing filters on thousands of customer antennas.
With relatively little business to protect in the United States, Eutelsat has reason to propose to the FCC that each operator handle its customers’ transition on its own, without the need for CBA involvement.
Government development spending protects Avio from low Ariane 5, Vega launch activity in 2019
The Z23 second stage is where the July Vega failure originated. Without a specific root cause found, the inquiry board proposed stricter procedures to be in place at Avio’s production facility. Avio produced these images, showing development of the stage to be used in the next flight, in its Nov. 7 presentation to shareholders. Credit: Avio SpA
LONDON — Launch vehicle hardware builder Avio SpA said its 2019 financial results will not suffer from the fact that only two of a planned 4-5 Vega launches will have occurred, and only four of the planned five campaigns for the heavy-lift Ariane 5.
Avio is prime contractor for Vega and a major component supplier for Ariane 5.
Neither vehicle has been as active as was planned early in the year. For Vega, the expected four or five launches including the inaugural flight of the more-powerful Vega-C vehicle did not occur because Vega has been grounded since its July failure.
The vehicle is currently expected to return to flight around March, and its manifest is unclear for 2019.
In a Nov. 7 investor presentation, Avio said it expected the Vega-C flight to occur by mid-year.
The July failure was caused by a still unexplained “sudden and violent” event localized in the forward dome of the Vega rocket’s Zefiro-23 second stage.
It was the first failure in Vega’s 15 flights. An investigation could not identify a root cause and instead said Avio should reinforce production verifications overall. Avio told investors that given the lack of any other explanation, there was a “possibility of an undetected non-compliance in production” of the Z-23 stage.
In his Nov. 7 presentation, Avio Chief Executive Giulio Ranzo displayed pictures of the production of the stage planned for the return-to-flight launch.
Credit: Avio SpA
Much of Avio’s revenue comes not from production of vehicles and components but from development programs managed by the 22-nation European Space Agency (ESA).
In addition, the company’s customer, the Arianespace launch service provider, books batch orders that mean hardware builders may not feel any immediate effects of a failure.
Avio is an Arianespace shareholder but shareholders in Arianespace do not view their investment as a source of funds. For Arianespace, the lower-than-expected activity in 2019 will have a direct effect on its revenue and profit.
At the end of 2018, Avio had been counting on three or four Vega launches and, in addition, the inaugural flight of Vega-C. Instead, 2019 like 2018 will be a two-launch year. Vega-C does not use the Zefiro-23 stage.
Longer term, Vega rocket competitiveness will depend on the rocket’s being launched as often as possible to reduce unit costs as it confronts a long list of competitors entering the market to launch small satellites.
The heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket is being phased out between 2020 and 2022 in favor of the Ariane 6. The Vega and Vega-C first stage serves as the Ariane 6 rocket’s strap-on booster. Depending on the mission, Ariane 6 carries two or four boosters.
Ariane 6, whose first flight is scheduled for late 2020, is likewise facing a highly competitive market among heavy-lift vehicles and will need to fill its manifest in order to reach the production cadence required to keep its costs down.
ESA is preparing a package of support programs to ease the market entry of Ariane 6 and Vega C. Totaling 2.67 billion euros ($2.95 billion), the measures will be decided at a Nov. 27-28 meeting of ESA ministers in Seville, Spain.
It is because of these development support programs that Ranzo could say:
“The Vega anomaly does not change our medium- and long-term growth plans.”
For the nine months ending Sept. 30, Avio reported revenue of 270.3 million euros, up 3% from the same period in 2018, and EBITDA of 23.5 million euros, up 5% from a year earlier.
Avio said the revenue increase “is primarily driven by the development activities of Vega-C and the new P120C that will equip the next-generation launchers Ariane 6 and Vega-C.”
Viasat: Consumer broadband ARPU up 17%; in-flight connectivity revenue could be $3 billion a year by 2028
Credit: Viasat
LONDON — Satellite broadband hardware and service provider Viasat Inc. asked investors to picture a world where Viasat’s current 29% share of the in-flight connectivity market in U.S. narrow body aircraft is extended worldwide while the global aircraft fleet doubles and passenger traffic increases by 2.3x.
And the percent of IFC-enabled aircraft rises considerably from today’s 30%.
“It’s a very big addressable market,” Viasat Chief Executive Mark D. Dankberg said. “IFC alone can be a multibillion-dollar annual business during the life of Viasat 3,” the company’s three-satellite 1-Tbps-per-satellite program scheduled to launch in 2021 and 2022 for global coverage. “At 30% globally, 2028 revenue would be $2 billion to $4 billion annually.”
Viasat said its U.S. narrow body market share was 21% a year ago and just 10% in September 2016, making it the only one of the four established IFC providers to have increased market share in the past three years.
Viasat’s comparison is with Gogo, still the market leader but now with less than 50% of the installed base; Global Eagle Entertainment (GEE) and Panasonic Avionics.
Including 85 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, which have been grounded as regulators evaluate its safety, Viasat has 1,438 aircraft fitted with its IFC system, with another 700 under contract. That’s a 51% increase from a year ago.
Credit: Viasat
In addition to its own satellites, the company uses capacity provided by partners in Europe and the Asia-Pacific in advance of the Viasat-3 arrival.
IFC is inside Viasat’s Satellite Services division, which includes fixed consumer broadband and the company’s expanding business providing Wi-Fi hotspots in emerging markets.
Viasat said that as of Sept. 30, its U.S. consumer broadband business counted 587,000 subscribers, a figure that hasn’t grown much in the past couple of years but is expected to return to growth when the first Viasat 3 satellite, to be stationed over the Americas, arrives in 2021.
But while the subscriber count has languished, Viasat has been increasing its per-subscriber yield. As of Sept. 30, monthly subscriber revenue was $86.94, up 17% from a year ago.
In a Nov. 7 investor call, Dankberg said Viasat has been able to transfer some Viasat-2 capacity from lower-demand regions to regions where it is more likely to find the high-dollar subscriber that Viasat prefers.
Although some bandwidth is lost in the process, he said the trade is favorable given the appetite subscribers in high-demand areas for the premium service.
Viasat has not disclosed what orbital slots it will use for the Viasat 3 satellites over Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and the Asia-Pacific.
Industry officials said Viasat has been leasing a satellite from Avanti Communications of London to occupy different orbital positions for the regulatory minimum period before moving to another position to perform the same function.
But beyond the company’s current partnerships with Telebras of Brazil, NBN in Australia and China Satcom, Viasat is going it alone for Viasat 3 in these new regions. The company’s consumer and IFC broadband partnership with fleet operator Eutelsat is winding down. Eutelsat ordered its own high-throughput satellite instead of sharing a Viasat 3.
“We are in a temporarily stable situation,” Dankberg said of the Eutelsat relationship. “We have an accommodation with them. They use our network, we use their satellite. It’s probably not the long-term solution. We are working with them on what the end state will be.”
More generally, he said the plan for the global Viasat 3 network is “to bring the satellites to market ourselves,” with regional partnerships.
Viasat did not discuss any implications for its IFC business with China Satcom of the loss of the Chinasat 18 satellite earlier this year: http://bit.ly/345bhpb
Sky and Space Global capital raise falls short, shareholders to vote on repriced, 2-part transaction
Credit: GomSpace
PARIS — Sky and Space Global, a satellite IoT and messaging startup whose project has been stalled because of liquidity issues, said its shareholders declined to subscribe to the full recapitalization of 15 million Australian dollars ($10.4 million), forcing a separate attempt to place the shortfall.
Australia-traded, British-registered Sky and Space (SAS) had received shareholder approval in late September to raise the 1.5 billion new shares but its efforts in October to confirm that support yielded just 10.9 million Australian dollars.
The company has set a Dec. 16 shareholder meeting to approve a share placement with selected investors totaling 5 million Australian dollars.
“The company received strong demand to support the recapitalization raising. However, due to deteriorating market conditions and equity market sentiment in October 2019, the full 15 million [Australian dollars] placement was not completed,” the company said in a statement to the Australia’s ASX exchange.
SAS has said it needs 15 million Australian dollars to cover the construction of eight inclined-orbit satellites by GomSpace of Sweden and Denmark. These satellites will, the company has said, provide near-term revenue and allow for the investment in the larger equatorial-orbit constellation, also to be built by GomSpace.
“On completion of the entitlement issue and the placement, SAS will be well-;laced to accelerate its global growth strategy as it prepares to launch its first commercial 6U nanosatellites,” the company said Nov. 8.
SAS is GomSpace’s biggest customer. Its cash issues have caused a deterioration of GomSpace’s financial results, in part because GomSpace made capital investments in plant expansion based on the expected SAS work: http://bit.ly/2PjFM79
Merchant Corporate Advisory Pty Ltd. is the lead manager for both transactions.
Trading in SAS shares has been suspended during the capital drive and will not resume until the funds are raised and SAS has appointed two Australian-resident members to its board.
SAS said it continues to work on U.S.-based debt financing and grants from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research program and from the 22-nation European Space Agency (ESA).
C-Band Alliance warns of legal action against any FCC-led auction, says Eutelsat is on board
Credit: C-Band Alliance
LONDON — The C-Band Alliance of satellite operators seeking U.S. regulatory approval for a CBA-managed auction of satellite spectrum told the U.S. Congress that an FCC-run auction — an alternative some CBA opponents have proposed — would face legal challenge from many quarters, starting with the CBA itself.
In a Nov. 7 letter to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, the CBA it doubted whether the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had the authority to reclaim spectrum licensed to satellite operators and distribute it to 5G terrestrial wireless operators.
“Several parties, including the CBA, have raised concerns that the FCC lacks the authority to confiscate C-band spectrum without compensating the satellite operators that currently use the spectrum.”
Signed by CBA Executive Vice President Peter Pitsch, the letter said proceeds from an FCC-managed auction to 5G bidders would by law go directly to the U.S. Treasury.
That being the case, the auction winners “would likely need to directly negotiate and fund [spectrum] clearing with the multiple C-band operators and thousands of Earth stations.”
The letter’s was ostensibly intended to correct what CBA said were inaccurate statements made by witnesses at an Oct. 29 subcommittee hearing. It reasserts its previous message that China is advancing quickly in 5G and could overtake the United States if U.S. regulators did not act quickly.
The letter also addressed the “holdout problem” that results from the fact that any auction would need to compensate all eligible C-band spectrum license holders, since the licenses grant each of them access to the full 500 MHz of spectrum, 3.7-4.2 GHz, covered by their operating licenses.
That means all eligible satellite operators with C-band licenses in the United States need to be compensated.
The CBA now has three members — Intelsat, SES and Telesat. Fleet operator Eutelsat has left the alliance, raising the issue of whether Eutelsat could itself constitute a “holdout” and complicate a CBA-managed auction.
But while Eutelsat has quit the alliance, seeking a larger share of the CBA-led auction proceeds, it has not challenged the CBA’s position.
In an Oct. 3 letter to the FCC, Eutelsat said its chief executive, Rodolphe Belmer, “stressed the legitimacy of the CBA to act as the transition facilitator and would therefore agree to rejoin for the transition stage of the process.”
While Eutelsat has questioned CBA’s offer of a “voluntary contribution” to the U.S. Treasury of a share of the proceeds — and has said any contribution should not exceed 50% of the proceeds net of costs to transition customers to a small slice of the C-band spectrum — it is not opposed to it.
“Mr. Belmer clearly expressed his agreement to a significant contribution,” the Eutelsat letter to the FCC said.
Intelsat has said it has no idea where Eutelsat came up with the 50% figure, and has warned Eutelsat that staying out of the CBA could compromise its rights to the eventual auction proceeds: http://bit.ly/2pnHecE
Credit: C-Band Alliance
Intelsat said the CBA’s latest proposal of clearing 300 of the 500 MHz, including a 20-MHz guard band, would cost the satellite operators about $3 billion to modify broadcast customers’ Earth stations and launch eight new satellites — four each from Intelsat and SES as part of a planned joint procurement by the two companies.
Aside from launching satellites to allow current C-band customers to continue their current programing with 40% less spectrum, CBA said it would need to design and install some 100,000 filters for 35,000 antennas in the continental United States and implement new-generation signal-compression technologies.
There is no other scenario, including an FCC-managed auction, that would assure this investment would be made, CBA said.
Northrop Grumman: Our OmegA rocket’s business case can close with just 4 launches per year
Kent Rominger. Credit: Moonandback media
WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman says it can close the business case on its new OmegA launch vehicle with as few as four missions per year, owing in part to the company’s existing space and missile systems infrastructure, on which much OmegA development will draw.
One of four new vehicles competing for a national security space launch contract to be awarded by the U.S. Air Force next year, OmegA is designed to serve the civil and commercial communications satellite markets as well.
“We can go down to just two or three missions from the Air Force and our business case still closes, and that’s planning on only about two additional missions if times really get tight,” said Kent Rominger, vice president and capture lead for Northrop Grumman space launch systems. “Our plan is to fly more than that minimum of four missions, but we can go that low and our business case still closes.”
The Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $791 million launch services agreement in October 2018 to build and launch the first OmegA rockets starting in 2021. The company is now vying for the multi-year Air Force block buy that would see the service divvy up 34 launches between just two service providers over a five-year period starting in 2022.
Other rockets in the offing are the new Vulcan launch vehicle in development at incumbent United Launch Alliance (ULA), and the New Glenn vehicle offered by the Jeff Bezos-owned startup Blue Origin. SpaceX, whose Falcon Heavy lift rocket is certified for Air Force launches, is a fourth contender, though the company is not part of the service’s down-select.
Northrop Grumman has designed OmegA to comprise two rockets: an intermediate version able to lift about 85% of U.S. national security missions, as well as civil and commercial satellites; and a heavy variant for hard-to-reach, high-energy orbits. Both vehicles will incorporate Castor boost stages that draw on decades of solid-rocket-motor technology from NASA’s space shuttle program, as well as smaller motors that have flown on the Pentagon’s Minuteman and Trident missile systems.
“One of the ways that we have designed the system to be affordable is to leverage all that existing infrastructure; we need new tooling for OmegA, but we don’t have to put in much infrastructure,” Rominger said Oct 23 at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here. “Because our facilities that are manufacturing the solid rocket motors are not just doing OmegA, we can actually ebb and flow” between demand for national security launches and one or two commercial missions per year, Rominger said.
Credit: Northrop Grumman
Northrop Grumman test-fired the core stage Castor 600 in May. Although the test gathered a trove of data, an anomaly occurred, resulting in damage to the nozzle of the core stage solid-rocket-motor nozzle and pushing a static-fire test of the second-stage Castor 300 to the end of February next year, according to company officials.
Both the Castor 600 and Castor 300 will comprise the core stages of OmegA’s intermediate variant, which will be capable of lifting over 9,000 kg to geosynchronous transfer orbit. The heavy version, equipped with two Castor 600 boost stages, will be able to place 14,000 kg to GTO.
To augment core stage performance, both OmegA variants can fly up to six strap-on GEM-63XL boosters, which have flight heritage in ULA’s Delta 2 and Delta 4 programs. A similar booster, the GEM-63, is scheduled to fly on a ULA Atlas 5 rocket starting next year, following a successful third test-firing in October at Northrop Grumman’s Promontory, Utah, facility. It is slated to replace Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AJ-60A solid rocket booster.
For OmegA, Northrop is developing two variants of the GEM-63 motors: the baseline GEM-63XLT strap-on for enhanced performance, and a GEM-63XLT that is vectorable.
“For roll control we chose to use a vectorable nozzle rather than an existing attitude control system that’s on it for roll control without strap-ons,” Rominger said. “On the intermediate, you can choose zero to six strap-ons, but the first strap-on will always vector. After that they will be fixed.”
OmegA’s cryogenic third stage comprises Aerojet Rocketdyne’s flight-proven RL-10C engine, which currently powers the Centaur upper stage on ULA’s Atlas 5 and Delta 4 launchers.
“We designed this system to be simple to maintain a schedule for a tight timeline,” Rominger said of OmegA, which will fly two RL10Cs. “It has separate tanks for the liquid oxygen and the hydrogen. It’s going through qualifications, and it’s a very proven motor, so there’s minimal development on it.”
OmegA’s upper stage is currently being assembled at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Rominger said Northrop Grumman plans by the end of 2020 to have a completed stage in the vacuum chamber at NASA’s Plum Brook Station, near Cleveland, for testing.
OmegA will also incorporate avionics already in use on targets and interceptors designed for the U.S. missile defense system.
“We fly about 16 sets of those avionics per year on our smaller systems, on our targets, and that system has evolved for Omega as well,” Rominger said.
Like its competitor vehicles, OmegA is designed to serve the stringent requirements of national security missions, while simultaneously meeting an Air Force requirement to offer a commercially viable rocket.
However, unlike its competitors, OmegA is not designed to be reusable. Northrop Grumman has concluded that the economy of scale of a larger rocket requires putting as much energy into delivering a payload to orbit as possible, rather than reserving fuel to return the vehicle for reuse. It’s a frequent topic in the reusable-v-expendable debate.
Rominger said OmegA’s Castor motors will use a new electro-hydrostatic power unit for thrust-vector control.
“This size of motor in the past for NASA had a hydrazine-powered hydraulic power unit that gave you the hydraulics for the thrust-vector control, but we have transitioned to electro-hydrostatic by Moog,” Rominger said.
In addition, he said Northrop recently completed the winding of the first flight motor for the first Air Force certification flight slated for 2021.
OmegA also employs advances in solid rocket technology to ensure sensitive payloads have a smooth ride.
“We knew with these very expensive national security spaceflight satellites that could have very delicate instruments on board, you had to provide a great ride quality,” Rominger said. “We designed our motors for ride quality first, performance second. We were very careful in designing our system.”
The May 2019 static test firing of OmegA’s first stage. Credit: Northrop Grumman
With the ability to spread the cost of OmegA across existing production lines, and given the recent Castor 600 static fire test and an upcoming static fire of the Castor 300 expected at the end of February 2020, Northrop officials say the company is likely to continue the launch vehicle development in some form, even if it loses the Air Force tender.
In addition, Northrop Grumman has plans to augment OmegA’s liquid third stage to deliver missions beyond Earth’s orbit, potentially to cis-lunar space, Rominger said.
“With all the interest in trans-lunar now, we’re looking at NASA, who are looking for other spacecraft or launch vehicles to complement their Artemis program, and we know with the system today we can put 12.3 metric tons into trans-lunar orbit, and it’s similar for trans-martian orbits,” Rominger said. “Certainly on the heavy system we will evolve the upper stage to gain more performance to meet some of those demands that we see coming.”
In the meantime, Northrop Grumman is in the process of restructuring its development and production segments to combine space and launch capabilities under a new space systems division. During an Oct. 24 earnings call with analysts, Northrop Grumman CEO and President Kathy Warden said the realignment is a logical next step following the company’s acquisition of the former Orbital ATK in June 2018.
“We expect Space Systems will be the fastest growing sector in our new structure,” Warden said.
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