World Satellite Business Week. Photo: Euroconsult

[Via Satellite 09-27-2016] In a year of landing rockets, mega-High Throughput Satellite (HTS) ideas and renewed faith in Non-Geosynchronous (NGSO) orbits, 2016 has been exceptionally newsworthy. Even more news came out during Euroconsult’s 2016 World Satellite Business Week (WSBW) in Paris earlier this month, including a new family of Proton rockets, a Blue Origin reusable orbital vehicle and a massive new satellite award to Boeing.

Via Satellite tallies up our top five takeaways exclusively from panel sessions at WSBW.

1. Telesat Talks Numbers on LEO Constellation

Global satellite operator Telesat threw its hat in the LEO ring this year, announcing in April that the company had secured “very favorable” Ka-band spectrum rights from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and placed orders with Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) and Space Systems Loral (SSL) for prototype spacecraft. On a panel at WSBW, Telesat President and CEO Dan Goldberg said the operator could achieve full global coverage with 72 satellites in polar orbits, but wants to start with far more than that in order to address very high bandwidth capacity requirements.

Goldberg said the pending constellation “will be a mix of a polar orbit and inclined and equatorial orbit” satellites in order to prevent the system from aggregating most of the capacity over the poles. The larger number, he said, would let Telesat add capacity in more populated regions.

“[With an] initial 72 you get full global coverage, but 150 to 200 combined will provide a huge amount of usable capacity as opposed to just theoretical capacity,” he said.

Goldberg said the constellation would use inter-satellite links to communicate between spacecraft, and that Telesat has filed patents for “some really unique features” on how it will operate. Telesat anticipates the constellation will serve mobility markets, government, and some point-to-point trunking applications. Goldberg said initially the constellation would not focus on residential broadband, but perhaps as technology evolves, this could become a reachable market as well.
“It’s a global IP network and every satellite in the network is a router,” he explained. “I think the markets it addresses is going to be a function of where particularly ground technology is at any given point.”

2. SSL Building Octagonal Satellites for Terabit-Level Spacecraft

SSL President John Celli, a 40-year industry veteran, said the industry has never realized the cost of fitting a square peg in a round hole. Minus a few earlier satellites of the past, Celli said that the industry has essentially “been designing satellites in the wrong way” because they don’t adequately consider the available volume inside a rocket.

“The launch vehicle is a cylinder, pretty much, and we put in a satellite that has a form factor with a footprint of a square or rectangle. It’s the wrong way to do it; you are wasting a lot of volume,” he said. Celli added that SSL has done a study showing how to shrink the size of an HTS satellite to less than half the size of one currently in its factory “by building the satellites in modules using the flexibility of the software-defined payload.”

“We are not ready to publicize it yet, but we do have a design that basically has modules of roughly octagonal shape that you can fit one on top of the other,” he said.

Celli added that the modular design could allow customers to one day remove payloads after a few years and install fresh ones while on orbit. Though admitting skepticism about the viability of the terabit-level satellite, he said this is a significant industry milestone for the year.

3. Coface Will Strictly Link OneWeb Support to Level of French Labor

Frederique Gournail, head of project finance for space, telecommunications and energy at Coface, the French Export Credit Agency (ECA), said that when it comes to funding projects, the agency works within a rigid regulatory framework. While there is no cap for how much Coface could technically support a project, Gournail said the agency sets its limit based on “the French content of the deals.”

Talking specifically about OneWeb, Gournail said Coface would have to see which companies are involved and what amount of French content is in the commercial contract. “Our guarantee of support will be directly linked to this amount,” she said.

OneWeb has created a joint venture with Airbus Defence and Space to form OneWeb Satellites, the company tasked with building 900 small telecommunications satellites. OneWeb Satellites plans to build the first 10 in France before moving mass production to the United States. Along with Airbus, French partners include Arianespace for launch and Sodern for star trackers. Of particular importance, Gournail said Coface weighs labor very heavily when determining how much funding to give.

“We don’t consider the ‘made by’ or ‘made for’ as French content. It’s really the people who are working in France that counts,” she said.

Gournail said Coface is in the very early stages of determining how much financial support it will give to OneWeb. She described the ECA’s role as being present for French exporters to take risk when the market will not, or to be part of senior lending when a deal is to big to be financed solely by the market.

“We will be here to support our exporter but we will be very careful because we owe it to the taxpayer,” she added.

Coface has garnered increased attention since the expiry of the Export Import Bank of America’s charter last year, which put a freeze on new projects. The U.S. Congress has since reauthorized Ex-Im Bank, but the ECA still lacks a quorum on its board of directors and is therefore incapable of financing projects in excess of $10 million.

4. SpaceX Expects to Return to Flight by November

While admitting at the time that SpaceX had not identified the root cause of the Sept. 1 anomaly that claimed both rocket and payload (Spacecom’s Amos 6 satellite), President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said the company estimates it shouldn’t take more than about three months for the Falcon 9 to return to flight.

“We are anticipating being down for about three months and getting back to flight in the November timeframe. We’ll launch on the East Coast from Pad 39A in that timeframe and then Vandenberg will be available for our customers Iridium and our other [Sun-Synchronous Orbit] SSO customers,” she said.

SpaceX has formed a team with NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Air Force to study the anomaly. Shotwell said that SpaceX will not fly until it has a good understanding of the cause or causes that led to the Sept. 1 explosion. The November estimate, she said, is based on the timeline for recovery from the Commercial Resupply Services 7 (CRS-7) mission that destroyed a Falcon 9 and Dragon payload in 2015.

“We came back after a significant flight failure last June in five and a half months, combined with the rollout of a brand new rocket … so I don’t think we are going to need more than three months or so,” she said.

On Sept. 23, SpaceX released a statement that traces the explosion to “a large breach in the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank.” The company updated this statement, which is based on a preliminary review of data and debris to add that “at this time, the cause of the potential breach remains unknown.”

SpaceX said there is no connection between this year’s failure and last year’s CRS-7 mishap. So far SpaceX has launched eight times this year — a new record for the company. The Sept. 1 explosion does further push back the debut of the Falcon Heavy, with Shotwell now saying the rocket would probably have its maiden flight in the first quarter of 2017 as opposed to this year. In the meantime, she said the focus is getting back to flight as quickly as the company can do so reliably.

“We know the rocket pretty well, and there are a few things we can exonerate, and a few things we need to go take a closer look at. Maybe it’s a confident hope, but whatever the issue is, we’ll find it and we’ll fix it, and three months is about the right amount of time,” she said.

5. Space Resources Companies Gravitating to Luxembourg

In line with Luxembourg’s goal of being the go-to location in Europe for space resource and exploration companies, Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said companies interestd in new forms of space business such as asteroid or lunar mining are setting up shop in the country.

“A space robotics research team has started work at the University of Luxembourg, and new companies are settling in Luxembourg on a monthly basis, integrating our space cluster. Deep Space Industries as well as Planetary Resources have opened up shop in Luxembourg, and their engineers are building satellites in Luxembourg right now,” he said.

Luxembourg, the home of SES and Intelsat, is aming to be the first country in Europe to create a legal framework for private industry to pursue resources in space. Bettel reaffirmed that Luxembourg is drafting this framework with full consideration of international law. “We are eager to engage with other countries on this matter within a multilateral framework,” he added.

Both Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have satellite constellation projects underway. Planetary Resources is building a hyperspectral Earth Observation (EO) satellite system that it anticipates will generate revenue while driving the technology needed for asteroid mining. Deep Space Industries is building the pathfinder satellite constellation for HawkEye 360, a company that plans to conduct space-based radio frequency mapping.

Bettel said space is a risky field to do business, but expressed confidence that there will be rewarding discoveries along with way. From a policy standpoint, he said Luxembourg wants to continue to prepare for more successes in the space industry.

“If the technology works and people adopt it, the legislation has to follow. Of course, the opposite is equally true. If legislation is future-proof, this also helps innovation to occur,” he said.