Post-Election Hosted Payloads and the Fiscal Cliff

We can safely assume that U.S. President Barack Obama didn’t have much of a re-election celebration last week. After all, the executive and legislative branches of the government have just a few weeks to figure out how to avert both the so-called “fiscal cliff” and $110 billion in automatic cuts to defense and domestic programs next year.
   Projected defense spending over the next 10 years was expected to grow to $640 billion. Now, election battle-worn politicians from both sides of the aisle are trying to come up with a deficit-cutting plan of $1.2 trillion over 10 years. Recommendations vary from a frightening $4 trillion in budget cuts over a decade, including deep reductions in defense to additional cuts of $10 billion a year as part of a solution to avoid the across-the-board cuts. Can you tell which idea comes from Republicans and which comes from Democrats? Neither can I.
   So, what does the fiscal cliff mean for hosted payloads and the milsatcom industry in general? Let’s explore the positive response first: the biggest assets that hosted payloads have are their abilities to cut costs and deploy quickly and on time. Thus, hosted payloads could actually benefit from the consequences of the fiscal cliff. The pessimists’ viewpoint is that the President and Congress have no idea where to make cuts and will only look at the numbers. If they haven’t read the massive amounts of research that commercial satellite industry and its military partners put together during the past four years, what makes anyone think they will get through it in just a few weeks?
   Despite the fear, I’m solidly in the positive camp. The discussions at this year’s Hosted Payload Summit in September took both potential election results into consideration and the math always arrived to the same conclusion – hosted payloads never were a “be-all, end-all, must-have” solution, but rather a solution that makes logistical, financial and technical sense for customers standing on the edge of the fiscal cliff, as well as those tumbling over it.