In Orbit
COMMENTARYBy Frank Morring, Jr.Senior Editor Frank
Morring, Jr., blogs at:
AviationWeek.com/onspace
[email protected]George Whitesides, former NASA
chief of staf who helped formulate
the Obama administration’s expanded
push for new commercial applications
in orbit and later moved into the field
himself as CEO of Virgin Galactic, sees
a happy marriage between Silicon Val-
ley’s cellphone industry and the small
but useful spacecraft emerging from en-
gineering schools. The ofspring could
be “the basis for a new layer of informa-
tion infrastructure that goes far beyond
what we have today,” he believes.
“There are several key trends con-
verging now on the small-space sector,
and they have the potential to reshape
our industry,” he said during the Satel-
lite 2015 conference in Washington.
“First [is] the insatiable demand for
data communications and real-time
information about our planet. Second
[is] the prospect for bringing mass-
production techniques and commodity
electronics to space assets. And third,
[there are] new funding sources, some
with vast balance sheets, particularly
from the information industry.”
That probably sounds familiar to
John Paffett, CEO of Surrey Satellite
Technology US, the Denver-based
subsidiary of the British enterprise
that pioneered commercial smallsat
development in the late 1970s. Under
the leadership of Martin Sweeting,
the company spun out of the engi-
neering school at the University of
Surrey by “leveraging on the back
of commercial technologies” in the
automotive and telecommunications
fields. Now Surrey hopes to tap into
the same trends Whitesides noted, inL
ong-held hopes for a new economic sector in low Earth orbit
(LEO) are beginning to bear fruit, well before the first paying
space tourists get a glimpse of the black sky above the atmo-
sphere. New technologies and applications are attracting serious
private investment into the spacecraft and launch-services sec-
tors, driving what is beginning to look like a sea change in the
way space is exploited.Smallsat Synergy
Big money now gravitating toward smallsats
a new era and on a new continent.
“A lot of people said ‘are you here
because the U.S. has such a big budget
for space,’ and the answer is ‘no,’” says
Pafett, a long-time Surrey executive
who commutes between Denver and
the U.K. “We’re not here for the govern-
ment budget. We’re here because we
think the environment is conducive.”
A big part of that environment is
financial. Whitesides’ company is bank-
rolled by the Virgin Group, which is also
backing OneWeb Ltd. along with chip-
maker Qualcomm and O3b Networks
founder Greg Wyler. SpaceX, which
is running architecture studies for a
competing LEO smallsat broadband
constellation out of Redmond, Washing-
ton, has $1 billion committed by Google
and Fidelity (AW&ST Jan. 21, p. 24).
Beyond the billionaires with a
personal interest in space, including
Virgin’s Richard Branson and Elon
Musk of SpaceX, the field is attracting
investors purely out to make a buck.
They include such companies and in-
dividuals as DFJ, Bessemer, InnovationEndeavors, Vulcan, Asset Management
Ventures, Capricorn, Ray Rothrock and
O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
For Whitesides, the attraction of
space at Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road
and other venture capital centers is
clear. He cites the example of SkyBox
Imaging, which was started by four
Stanford University graduate students
as a way to deliver Earth-observation
data cheaply. Skybox quickly attracted
$90 million in investment capital,
launched two satellites and cashed in
when Google acquired the company for
half a billion dollars.
“That means that in a span of five
years we saw a group of grad students
take a company from an idea on the
back of a napkin, through an impres-
sive fund-raise from some very savvy
investors, two generations of satellite
design and then the successful exit of
those investors at a great multiple,”
Whitesides says.
That kind of churn is driving Virgin
Glactic’s LauncherOne, a rocket air-
launched from the WhiteKnightTwo
carrier aircraft, which was originally
developed for the company’s Space-
ShipTwo suborbital human vehicle for
tourists and researchers. Launcher-
One is in development to place 500
lb. of payload into equatorial LEO
and half that in Sun-synchronous
polar orbits at less than $10 million a
flight. The company is hot-fire test-
ing the third upgrade of its Newton
hydrocarbon-fueled rocket engine—a
60,000-70,000-lb.-thrust version.
Others drawn to the smallsat-launch
niche include Firefly Space Systems of
Austin, Texas, and Steve Jurvetson, a
principal in DFJ Venture, who was an
early SpaceX backer (AW&ST Aug. 15
and Aug. 25, 2014, pp. 24 and 33, respec-
tively). The prospects of building con-
stellations like OneWeb, and the need
for rapid replenishment with newer
technology, are driving a development
and marketing frenzy for small-space-
craft and launchers (see page 31).
“Newer technology and higher
production rates can create a cycle that
may generate its own Moore’s Law for
space,” Whitesides says of Planet Labs,
which has launched more than 70 small
satellite testbeds from the ISS (see
photo) and elsewhere, with development
cycles sometimes measured in weeks. cAviationWeek.com/awst AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MARCH 30-APRIL 12, 2015 27NASAA pair of Planet Labs “Dove” satel-
lites leaves the ISS. Rapid turnover in
smallsat design is attracting serious
investment to the field.