The Obama Administration’s new space policy brings an increased emphasis to the commercial satellite industry as a key player in the future space roadmap. Specifically, the policy calls on government space-based agencies to look first to commercial assets – a strategy that it hopes will lead to faster innovation and more economical access to space while fostering international collaboration and shared risk-taking.
Patricia Cooper, president of the Satellite Industry Association (SIA), says the policy “legitimizes a lot of discussions that the satellite industry has been having with both military and civil space agencies on a host of issues, including hosted payloads and collaborating for more secure communications and on-orbit safety.”
To Marion Blakey, president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), the new policy shows “tremendous potential” for providing healthy growth for both entrepreneurial start-ups and larger firms that have significant commercial space assets. “The new National Space Policy sets a tone that urges more international cooperation. Of course, with the ISS (International Space Station) completed, we feel it’s a great symbol of what can happen. However, we have to recognize it’s a two-way street. It’s not just international access to U.S.-funded programs; it is also U.S. companies’ access to other countries’ programs.”
Josh Hartman, a former U.S. Air Force acquisition officer who now runs the Center for Strategic Space Studies (CS3), a government policy think tank, is most encouraged by the policy’s positive tone that encourages greater international and commercial engagement. “I think the biggest impact will be just a better global perspective and understanding of space not just to our security lives, but also to our every day lives as non-military, non government citizens,” Hartman says.
While it’s too soon to determine how the policy ultimately will roll out, many space sector observers expressed optimism that the policy also signals a willingness to look at export control reform. The U.S. House of Representatives passed an International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) reform bill removing commercial telecommunications satellites and related components from the U.S. Munitions List, however, the Senate is delaying any action until the release of a U.S. Department of Defense report outlining which space items it recommends be eliminated from the Munitions List. “I think we are closer to reform than we’ve ever been over the last 12 years, and we’re gratified to see how much interest there is in revisiting legislation, particularly out of concern for the health of the space industrial base,” says Cooper.
Crippling Effects of ITAR
More than a decade ago, the U.S. mandated by legislation that exports of all satellites and related components and technology be controlled by the U.S. State Department and licensed pursuant to ITAR. The decision kept many U.S. companies out of the international space market, allowing Europe and other global players to gain ground, developing so-called ITAR-free spacecraft with no U.S. components that can launched on Chinese vehicles. “Before these policies, the United States had about three-quarters of the world market, and we’re now about 40 percent to 50 percent annually for the world market for satellites,” says Cooper.
ITAR compliance costs the commercial satellite industry an average of $50 million per year, with licensing issues costing as much as $600 million per year of lost revenues, according to a 2008 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “Health of the U.S. Space Industrial Base and the Impact of Export Controls.” Cooper says space component subcontractors are feeling the brunt of the effects of not being able to compete on the global stage. “The effect isn’t necessarily the loss of significant prime contracts. The effect is on our smaller companies that don’t have huge ITAR licensing departments. They can’t afford to sell outside the United States, so many leave the marketplace.”
TeleCommunication Systems (TCS), a secure satcom and wireless communications applications systems integrator, sees the new space policy as a positive momentum driver for ITAR reform. “I think it solidifies the need for faster reform,” says retired U.S. Army Col. Allen Green, TCS Government Solutions Group vice president for strategic programs. Allen notes that the loss of leadership in U.S.-led innovation in the worldwide satellite market has a trickle down effect on “our ability to innovate at the ground network level as well.”
Current export controls have also proven burdensome for larger companies. Kalpak Gude, vice president and deputy general counsel of Intelsat, says ITAR restrictions have created many challenges, most notably when Intelsat pursues joint venture agreements with third parties. “It also creates problems with our customers in providing them health information on our satellites and in dealing with insurers because the insurance community wants to know the technical information.”
Gude hopes the ITAR reform will lead to more commercial launch options. He says current rules limit commercial U.S. operators to a pair of providers, France-based Arianespace and Russian Proton rockets procured through U.S.-based International Launch Services. “While (U.S.-based) Space-X hopes to get there, they are years away from launching satellites of the size that communications companies require. Being limited to what are effectively two providers is problematic and risky given how integral satellites are to overall communications networks and national security,” he adds, noting that a launch failure could derail commercial launches. “People have not paid attention to what’s happened in the launch marketplace and today how reliant we are on other foreign suppliers — and not even diversified the foreign suppliers,” he says. Gude remains optimistic that change is coming, though he declined to predict how soon due to uncertainty on what position the new U.S. Congress will take on the issue.
Commercial Industry Engaged
Without question, large and small companies see the policy’s overall direction as very positive for the commercial space industry. TCS hopes this will open up even more opportunity for the company’s government business, which today accounts for more than 50 percent of revenues. TCS currently has 200 staff deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq to support the company’s products and services. “The new policy will open up the government market to greater competition and will spur innovation in the overall private sector to compete for that business, so that’s a good thing,” says Allen. While TCS is mostly U.S.-focused, the company hopes in the next few years to leverage export control reform to look increasingly at global opportunities, especially at applications for remote monitor using machine to machine and SCADA networks, including global rail systems that rely on machine-to-machine interfaces to manage train services, Allen says.
“The more global approach is a very smart direction. Space is becoming globalized so we have to look to our international partners,” says Kay Sears, president of Intelsat General Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intelsat whose government business currently accounts for 18 percent of revenues. Sears hopes her company will play a strong role as the Defense Department develops a space architecture that likely will be a mix of international partners, commercial fleets and military assets. But it’s the National Space Policy’s call for inventive, non-traditional arrangements to acquire commercial goods and services that most excites Sears. “We’ve been very successful in the hosted payload realm. We see hosted payloads as one of those inventive ways that the government can get dedicated capability in space without having to go and buy their own free-flying satellites,” she says.
More Hosted Payloads Expected
The commercial satellite sector already is moving ahead of the Pentagon in deploying military capability into space that supports military needs, under the anticipation that once deployed, the demand from the Department of Defense will be there. The Intelsat IS-27 satellite, scheduled to reach orbit in 2012, will have a hybrid C- and Ku-band design for media and network customers and will be augmented with a UHF payload for use in government applications. In addition, MSS player Inmarsat will include government frequencies on its three planned Inmarsat-5 mobile broadband Ka-band satellites set for launch in 2014. “It’s very smart. I don’t think the commercial (sector) has much to lose to fill in the geosynchronous orbit in military frequencies. It certainly is an indicator to [the Pentagon] that they are serious,” says Col. Charles Cynamon, commander for the Milsatcom Advanced Concepts Group for the U.S. Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center, Military Satellite Communications System Wing.
While the Department of Defense is still in the early stages of defining requirements for assessing alternatives for what the warfighter will need in the 2018-2025 timeframe, hosted payloads are “certainly a viable option” and one of three areas of synergy being examined, Cynamon says. The other areas include purpose-built satellites based on commercial technologies and continued leasing of commercial satcom. Today, the commercial industry supplies 80 percent of the Defense Department’s military communications in commercial frequencies. In the future, this likely will include capability in military frequencies, Cynamon says.
In December, the Air Force began to award six-month contracts to develop viable solutions to meet the future military communications needs at military frequencies through a broad agency announcement, Milsatcom Commercial Architecture Options. These study contracts will include analysis of hosted payloads, which Cynamon emphasized will need to be cost-effective from a cost-per-bit for the number of beams the government needs relative to the wideband capabilities the military already is acquiring on the Wideband Global Satcom system. The outcome of these studies “will guide future program decisions,” says Cynamon. Government could benefit from more commercial involvement in Defense Department procurement by bringing more platform diversity and service flexibility, including better lifecycle costs, since the government would not need to own an entire satellite. Cynamon also anticipates better synchronization with the user on the ground by implementing solutions in space that work with and enhance the current user set of terminals.
The government also is looking at changing its acquisition approach to reflect more the commercial approach of tailoring satellites based upon orbital location. “In the commercial satellite community, they look at an orbital slot and say, ‘What is my user set look like underneath it?’ I’m going to tailor my beams and capabilities to that user set,” Cynamon says. Noting the strong track record the commercial industry has in getting assets into space, Cynamon reiterates a common saying in Pentagon and industry circles that every commercial launch is essentially a lost opportunity that the Department of Defense could have had. “We know that (the commercial industry) will launch a couple 100 assets in the next decade-and-a-half, so the opportunities are there for us to work with them,” he says.
Hartman hopes his think tank will play a role in bringing the government and industry together to move the National Space Policy forward. “The space policy will help open up dialogue with industry so that additional transparency can be added to the acquisition process,” he says.
NASA’s Future Tied to Commercial Space Sector
The NASA Authorization Act approved in October also mirrors the commercial sector’s increasing profile in space. NASA administrator Charles Bolden, in written remarks after the act was signed by the president, said, “We will foster a growing commercial space transportation industry that will allow NASA to focus our efforts on executing direction in the act to start work on a heavy-lift architecture to take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit and to develop a multipurpose crew vehicle for use with our new space launch systems.”
While the bill privatizes manned launches, it also puts an end to the Constellation program, the successor to the space shuttle that has been plagued by cost and schedule overruns. As envisioned, Constellation was to return astronauts to the moon by 2020, however, an independent government panel estimated last year that the Ares rocket system would not be ready for manned missions before 2017. A return to the moon was estimated to occur sometime in the mid-2020s. The U.S. has spent $11.7 billion to date developing the Constellation program’s Ares rockets and Orion crew capsule, according to NASA officials.
Blakey expressed concerns about job loss in the space sector as a result of that decision. “Moving away from the Constellation program has caused real concern, particularly along the Space Coast and some of our states that have had the biggest aspects of those programs, there have been very large layoffs. Our concern is that highly skilled people may very well have to gravitate to other industries because they simply do not have that volume of work currently coming from the new programs.” AIA, in a letter to Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas), noted that short-term layoffs directly related to the shutdown of the Constellation program total around 2,300, with another 500 jobs possibly being affected before the end of the fiscal year.
Even the Space Foundation was outspoken in noting that the U.S. Space Policy provision for developing and retaining space professionals “rings hollow so long as the administration’s plans for NASA continue to put thousands of American space professionals out of work.“
Hartman disagrees that Constellation’s cancellation will have a significant job loss impact. “I am not convinced that it is going to create significant damage to our space industrial base for the workforce. What it will cause is a shift of where those skills will be developed over the next five to 10 years,” he says, adding that a true indicator of job growth is in government funding, and NASA’s budget has enjoyed healthy increases over the last few years. The FY 2011 budget for NASA represents a topline increase of $6 billion. “In the aerospace sector, we have a shortage of key personnel who understand engineering, who understand space environments and who understand software development. People who have those skills are going to be sought after,” he says.
