The U.S. government is hungry for cost-effective access to space, and hosted payloads soon may be a tangible option for budget-strapped civil and military users. The Hosted Payload Office in the U.S. Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) expects to announce its long-anticipated Hosted Payload Solutions contract (HoPS) IDIQ by the end of May.

This new contracting vehicle will pre-qualify major satellite manufacturers and commercial operators to bid on hosted payload opportunities, a process the Air Force expects to complete by the end of the calendar year followed by the first delivery order contract by March 2014.

Col. Scott Beidleman, director, development planning, SMC, leads the Hosted Payload Office created nearly two years ago. He sees two major drivers for hosted payloads: affordability and the need for greater resilience in a climate of widening threats.

“We’re looking at doing potential hosted payload solutions to support virtually all of our missions, from overhead persistent infrared for the nation’s early missile warnings to communications and weather missions,” he says, adding, “If we’re going to put something on orbit, one of the initial questions now that we ask is, ‘Does it make sense to do a hosted payload?’”

Beidleman describes his office’s role as that of “matchmaker between government payloads and commercial hosts,” with the HoPS contract serving as a framework for establishing a stable of pre-qualified commercial vendors that can bid on individual government payload opportunities.

Even with the HoPS contracting vehicle poised to simplify and make provisioning of hosted payloads mainstream in the coming years, many industry watchers say it has taken too long and express doubts on whether program offices will bend to commercial timelines and faster decision-making.

“That ship has sailed for us,” notes Matt Desch, CEO for Iridium, who considers the contracting vehicle a small milestone compared with the major opportunities being wasted “every year that the government doesn’t get serious about this.”

In April, Iridium announced a deal with Harris that will enable Harris to use the expanded hosted payload space on the Iridium NEXT platform. As Desch says, the ship for Iridium in this regard has now sailed. The LEO operator was out front on hosted payloads five to six years ago, trying to secure government contracts for its Iridium NEXT constellation set to launch in February 2015. Unlike GEO operators who launch a satellite or two every year, Iridium offered a unique opportunity that won’t come again for another 10 to 15 years.

“20 Different Opportunities”

“We probably had more than 20 different payload opportunities,” Desch recalls. “The government agreed that the cost structure we were proposing was very attractive and they really liked some of the other attributes the Iridium network such as intersatellite links that would minimize the number of ground systems required.”

To further discussions along, Iridium founded the Hosted Payload Alliance two years ago. In the end, however, the government couldn’t move fast enough to meet Iridum’s commercial launch window, forcing it to form a private-sector partnership, Aireon, to realize its hosted payload strategy.

The move has paid off handsomely for Iridium. Aireon, which will deploy Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast (ADS-B) receivers into Iridium NEXT, finalized an agreement with Nav Canada, which will rely on the payloads to help it track aircraft position over North Atlantic airspace. The positioning data from the payloads is expected to generate customer fuel savings of more than $100 million per year, according to Nav Canada.

“Aireon was a perfect fit for us and in the end will be far more valuable than getting the government to finance a payload,” says Desch.

The biggest challenge this enterprise faces is aligning the government acquisition timelines with commercial timelines.

—Col. Scott Beidleman, SMC

Don Brown, VP of hosted payloads for Intelsat General, which successfully deployed a hosted payload for the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) in March 2012, says the current budget environment, and the DoD’s push to have increased resiliency and more highly distributed space architectures, are pushing hosted payload acceptance.

“The idea is that you can leverage commercial industry, using hosted payloads to get more missions in more places at less cost,” says Brown, who considers one of the government’s biggest drivers is tapping into the commercial satellite industry’s frequent launch schedule.

Patricia Cooper, president of the Satellite Industry Association (SIA), agrees, noting that major GEO operators offer recurring opportunities to host a government payload. SIA, along with the Hosted Payload Alliance, has worked diligently to bring government and industry together around this issue.

“There’s been an enormous amount of interest and effort on the part of DoD and other agencies to incorporate hosted payloads into budgets, programs, architectures and policy already,” Cooper says.

 

Hosted Payload Alliance

The Hosted Payload Alliance has been at the forefront in engaging government to hammer out the larger operational questions. In April, it held an industry-government workshop in Colorado Springs that attracted additional participation at remote sites at Petersen AFB and at two NASA locations.

“Sequestration, if anything, underlines the need for us to have this workshop and continue the open dialogue for hosted payloads, which represent a more cost-effective way to get access to space,” says Janet Nickloy, Alliance chair and director of Aerospace Mission Solutions for Harris Corporation, which was awarded the Nav Canada hosted payload contract.

The Alliance’s workshop agenda looked at hosted payload pre-acquisition activity – from construction and launch time frames, to the architecture phase itself. The meeting concluded with a look at contractual issues from information assurance to the question of who controls the satellite.

“We’re seeing a broad level of not only interest but also support from all aspects of the government – from policy to acquisition to operations,” says Nickloy.

 

NASA

On the civil agency side, NASA is leading the charge for hosted payloads and is collaborating more closely with the DoD by leveraging the HoPS contracting vehicle. According to Doreen Neil, senior research scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, NASA is funding a laser communications technology demonstration (LCRD), a heliophysics experiment (GOLD), and the Earth science payload TEMPO, all selected within the last 18 months.

“That’s enthusiasm! Wherever hosted payloads make sense, NASA’s science community will make them part of our solution,” she says, explaining that some of the questions NASA programs are asking when considering a hosted payload include, “Can NASA get the services we need cost effectively and can our scientists deliver on time?” and “Can we learn to work at the speed and efficiency of business?”

“NASA’s working with SMC on commercial access to space is a real success story of collaboration across government,” says Neil.

Two NASA Earth Science Division missions are being considered for hosted payloads: the TEMPO instrument, and the GEO-CAPE mission. According to Beidleman, TEMPO, an instrument to study air quality across the North American continent hourly during daytime, will likely be the first hosted payload contract awarded under HoPS.

“NASA has been involved very closely with us and was a presenter at our Industry Day [last February] with the HoPS contract, which attracted 120 attendees representing 40 companies,” he says.

 

Biggest Challenge

“The biggest challenge this enterprise faces is aligning the government acquisition timelines with commercial timelines,” admits Beidleman, noting that his office has sought commercial sector assistance to develop the appropriate mechanisms inside the IDIQ contract.

“We have pursued from day one a very open partnership with the industry in general – we need their help to make sure we get this right. We do have to change the paradigm,” he adds.

The idea of government hosted payloads isn’t new, notes Jeff Foust, senior analyst with Futron. In 2010, He helped develop a guide book for NASA that identified some of the contracting differences and other issues government customers need to consider when looking at hosted payloads.

“Industry and government are figuring out how to work well with each other because you have different contracting mindsets, different schedules and different processes between a government versus a commercial satellite program,” Foust says.

“D” D’Ambrosio, executive vice president for government solutions for O3b, says he’s met with the budget planners in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics on the question of a government hosted payload on O3b’s second-generation constellation. “We’re open to partnering with them,” says D’Ambrosio, who observes that the window for government payloads on O3b’s current generation of satellites has passed, given that the constellation will launch in June and September, with full commercial operation by year-end. He notes that there is nothing in the DoD budget for hosted payloads to date, though his team is evaluating the HoPS contracting vehicle.

“Things are changing in the budget constantly. [With Sequestration] you’re looking two to five years out, yet in the next year we will start planning for our second-generation satellites. The sooner the government comes back to us, the more time we have to figure a government payload into our plans,” D’Ambrosio says.

Cooper cautions that in a year where budgets are stressed, “the question will be whether hosted payloads continue to be seen as an opportunity for cost effectiveness and reliability and responsiveness, or as a new project that needs to be funded.”

Desch observes that the current budgetary environment “creates less creativity because everyone retreats to their core programs instead of thinking of doing something new.”

The SMC securing a delivery contract through HoPS could be a step in the right direction. Intelsat General, with its 2008 UHF hosted payload contract with the ADF, remains a leader in this model. So does Luxembourg-based SES, host of Air Force’s CHIRP (Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload) program, which was developed as part of the Air Force’s third generation infrared program known as 3GIRS. The CHIRP mission used its staring wide-field-of-view telescope to test concepts to spot and report missile launches. The original program called for four telescopes to provide full Earth coverage; CHIRP was limited to one telescope over the United States. “The Air Force extended the nine-month demonstration mission through this summer,” notes Rich Pang, senior director, hosted payloads, for SES Government Solutions.

 

An Uncertain Future

Looking ahead, several government and industry leaders are encouraged by the will of both sides to make hosted payloads a viable option for getting capability into orbit, even in an uncertain funding environment. But challenges remain.

“I’m very optimistic we’re going to get this rolling,” says Beidleman, admitting that he can’t predict the future with sequestration. “It’s not a matter of getting the HoPS contract off and running; it’s a matter of how many and how frequently we’ll have delivery orders to execute on the IDIQ contract.”

Desch remains less optimistic about the government moving quickly, noting a lack of incentives and significant cultural impediments.

“The movement toward hosted payloads is happening at a glacial pace,” says Desch, echoing estimates he’d heard at industry forums that it might take 10 to 15 years before hosted payloads are fully embraced in the DoD. That timeframe coincides with Iridium’s planning schedule for its next constellation. “I’m hopeful that the rest of the industry will be able to move faster than we were able to,” he concludes.

NASA’s Neil says accelerating the agency’s adoption of hosted payloads comes down to one issue: budget.

“Industry can work with the government in good faith to iron out all of the kinks in the industry-government partnership and deliver value for the government as a customer,” Neil says. “NASA is putting good people on these teams, people who can think differently, accomplish our best practices while minimizing the bureaucracy, and make decisions faster. When industry meets us part way, we know this can be successful.”