Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Launcher firms ready for liftoff SAMANTHA MASUNAGA
Rocket-makers multiply as small-satellite launches boom
LOS ANGELES — Suddenly, everyone from the U.S. government to commercial satellite companies, universities and even high school students needs to have a small satellite.
And that is fueling another boom, in Southern California and across the West, in companies dedicated to giving the satellites a ride to space.
SpaceWorks Enterprises Inc., an Atlanta-based engineering company, estimates that 210 satellites weighing less than 110 pounds will be launched this year to do such things as map the Earth, expand broadband access and track packages on ships. That’s up from just 25 launches in 2010. The number is expected to double again in five years.
In the past six months, at least half a dozen new launch vehicle firms aimed at the small-satellite market have cropped up, said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst for Teal Group, an aerospace and defense analysis company.
The ever-growing list includes Firefly Space Systems in Cedar Park, Texas; Rocket Lab in Los Angeles and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, best known for its space tourism endeavors.
In a quiet industrial park near Long Beach Airport where warplanes were once built around the clock, Virgin Galactic is making LauncherOne, a satellite-launching rocket that will drop from the wing of a 747.
“There is strong confidence in the aerospace community that small satellites are the way to go,” said Kevin Sagis, chief engineer for LauncherOne. “It’s an exciting time.” The hopes of the upstarts
are bolstered by news that companies such as SpaceX outside Los Angeles and OneWeb in Arlington, Va., are planning to launch constellations of hundreds or even thousands of satellites that would provide low-cost internet access, especially to more remote areas of the world.
Last year, SpaceX opened an office in Seattle where engineers will build smaller satellites for launch. Around the same time, Branson announced an investment in the OneWeb venture.
“Just those two companies alone can create a whole new market,” Caceres said. “And I think that’s what launch companies are looking for.”
Traditional satellite manufacturing has long been based in Southern California. Hughes
Electronics Corp. built satellites at its El Segundo facility outside Los Angeles for years before its space and communications businesses were acquired in 2000 by aerospace giant Boeing Co. Boeing still manufactures satellites in El Segundo.
Swarms of satellites are not a new idea. Huge satellite constellations were proposed back in the 1990s as a way to provide telecommunications services around the globe. But entrepreneurs badly underestimated the cost of building and blasting hundreds of satellites into orbit, and the proposed services were undercut by cheaper ground-based cellular services.
Industry players say this time will be different. They point to the greater diversity in satellite usage now as insurance against the bust of any one industry.
Planet Labs, for example,
says it operates the largest fleet of Earth observation satellites. Data from the San Francisco company’s nanosatellites can be used to monitor farmland and track carbon emissions.
Demand for mobile connectivity is also greater than it ever was in the 1990s, even in previously unconnected places such as airplanes.
And new technology has driven down the cost of developing and launching a satellite, aided in part by miniaturization; smaller satellites weigh less, and thus are cheaper to launch.
Tom Stroup, president of the Satellite Industry Association, said it’s not likely that all the satellite constellations that have been announced will be launched. But he expects at least one, if not more, of the proposed projects in each sector — imaging, broadband, communication services — to succeed.
“We live in a different world
than we did in the 1990s,” he said.
Another plus for this round of satellite projects is that they’re more likely to be backed by the companies’ own money, said Caceres of Teal Group.
“They’re not totally reliant on investors like they were in the 1990s,” he said. “So there’s a good chance that many of these companies will be able to put these thousands of satellites into orbit, and if they do, they need launch vehicles.”
Virgin Galactic is looking to produce rockets quickly and at low cost. On average, the company said it will cost $10 million to launch a 440-pound satellite to a 310-mile-high orbit, the one most commonly requested. That compares with SpaceX’s starting price of $62 million for its Falcon 9 rocket, or Rocket Lab’s $5 million charge for a 330-pound payload.