Driving the Future of Satellite Manufacturing
Having held out their collective hands for a bit of wrist slapping--regardless of culpability--the world's satellite manufacturers have gone back to the future in the sense that they listen carefully to what their customers are saying about current and projected needs. New applications, or the flowering of long-discussed trends, are driving some careful innovation.
"We are developing advances in both communications payload and bus technology," says Astrium President Antoine Bouvier. "A major breakthrough for us this year is the successful introduction of the Lithium-Ion battery. We were the first to implement on a commercial satellite.
"[These] batteries save hundreds of kilograms on a spacecraft, are safer and provide large margins during launch and orbital operations," Bouvier maintains. "They have been successfully demonstrated on Eutelsat's W3A and the Amazonas satellite and have been operated at full operational power during the longest equinox eclipses last September, fully meeting their predicted behavior."
On the payload side, Bouvier invokes successful Astrium programs. "A major technological advance in payloads has been achieved for the Inmarsat 4 satellites, for which we have developed the highest level of advanced technology to reconfigure the payload in orbit according to evolving mission requirements. Flexible combinations of multiple spotbeams are made possible by the large digital processor that provides channelization, switching, gain control and beam-forming."
Orbital, focused on the market for smaller satellites, sees a similar technology path. The company, Atia says, "continues to develop new technologies for future use on new satellites subject to the following general guidelines:
- Development is limited to improvements of the existing STAR Bus, and involves incremental evolutionary changes rather than large-scale revolutionary changes.
- Time frame for developments and implementation of new technologies must be consistent with schedules for manufacturing and launching new satellites.
- Thorough testing of prototypes is performed to mitigate any technical risks on flight models.
- The technology may have a reasonably significant impact on performance, cost or may enable new services to be introduced.
- The development cost must be affordable or can be incrementally funded.
"Some examples of bus and payload technologies that fit in the above guidelines and which Orbital is currently pursuing are Lithium-Ion batteries for onboard energy storage, star trackers for precision attitude determination and control, Ka-band multiple spotbeam antenna technologies, radiation cooled TWTAs and very low loss output multiplexers," he explains.
Boeing's Ryan chimes in, with emphasis on the impact of the government/military market as well. "The world demands communications services everywhere, all the time, and that's a prescription for opportunity," he says. "This is equally true in both commercial and government markets. We project the government market to double between now and 2013, with complementary, albeit somewhat slower, increases in the commercial market.
"We project some movement of replenishment satellites for the commercial constellations to move further out, as the new constellation owners improve their financials, hence delaying the recovery to the mid-1990s satellite quantities of about 20 satellites per year. New applications, like broadband and direct-broadcast services, are gaining a foothold in the market and growing rapidly, and provide a potential upside.
"We have slightly shifted our perspective to align our strategy to join this global growth process," Ryan adds. "We're not just building satellite platforms anymore--we're supplying satellite systems that unite elements in space, in the air, on the ground and at sea to make network-enabled operations possible. These are effectively an integrated architecture forming a network-enabled system that provides users the critical information they need, in real time, to make decisions and take action."
Similarly, SS/L has focused on providing value to its customers with, low-risk technologies, DeWitt says. "Key to minimizing risk is the use of flight-proven designs in new and creative ways. An example is in our use of spotbeam designs and frequency reuse to maximize a satellite's information capacity in orbit. For example, the iPSTAR satellite dramatically reduces the cost-per-bit on station, which provides the operator a huge competitive advantage."
Warming up to the theme, DeWitt adds, "SS/L provides in-orbit flexibility, so operators can take advantage of changing markets or multiple orbital slots with flight-proven technologies applied in creative ways. DirecTV 7S is a satellite that can operate Ku-band spotbeams at two different orbital positions using flight-proven technology. SS/L also inserts technologies as needed to improve on-orbit performance and reliability, reduce launch costs, and extend satellite life. Lithium-Ion batteries are helping to offset the large repeater mass of a 100-plus TWTA communications payload on iPSTAR. Stationary Plasma Thrusters (SPTs) extend the life and improve pointing for large unfurlable antenna payloads, such as MBSat."
All in all, it sounds like the satellite manufacturers are beating a path to the same outcome, increased customer satisfaction based on low-risk architectures, without incurring wrath by flying--or even suggesting--technology test-beds on commercial spacecraft.
LMCSS's Gavrilis perhaps says it best: "We believe that technological advances are clearly the lifeblood of our business and the enabler in continuous improvement of our products. We never lose sight of the fact that mission success and reliability are directly related to hardware heritage. In partnership with our major customers, we are currently developing and incrementally implementing new technologies, while maintaining a very low risk to the overall mission."
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