Rising opportunities in LEO have created excitement in the satellite industry. Yet, while the market for broadband continues to soar, concerns surrounding the costs of deploying new technologies threaten to dampen enthusiasm. That was the general consensus among panelists during Monday morning’s session “The New Economics and Costs of Building Constellations” at SATELLITE 2018.
“People have overbuilt and capacity has become a commodity,” said Mark Rigolle, CEO of LeoSat Enterprises. “What needs to happen is people need to stop overbuilding similar stuff. But people who are building LEO systems are building something different, something else.”
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Erwin Hudson, vice president of Telesat LEO, said organizations need to “dig a little deeper to see what is happening in the telecommunications market in general.” “Speeds have increased dramatically and as speeds go up, latency becomes critical,” said Hudson. “Now you’ve got this huge increase in bandwidth, a big demand for low-latency communications.”
Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of commercial civil space for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, said: “My friends to the left here are building LEO constellations. I think that’s wonderful; but there isn’t a single panacea for this market. I don’t think GEO’s going away.”
Debra Facktor, vice president and general manager of strategic operations at Ball Aerospace, emphasized the importance of focusing on bigger-picture architecture. “Putting them all together in an overall architecture is taking advantage of the astrodynamics and orbital mechanics of what you can get from each orbit,” she said.
Rigolle said he is hopeful that as the ability to produce higher volumes goes up, costs will naturally fall. “One thing that struck me when I joined LeoSat was the effect of volume on unit cost.”
“I’m a bit worried about the starting point of many of these business cases,” Rigolle added. “[LeoSat] started with a problem and found a solution. Many other companies I see start out with a goal and then say, ‘how can I do that at a reasonable price point?'” VS
