32 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MARCH 30-APRIL 12, 2015 AviationWeek.com/awst
for the original Iridium
constellation of 66 satel-
lites launched in the late
1990s. OHB System of
Germany is in the hunt as
well, based on its experi-
ence building a small fleet
of radar reconnaissance
satellites for the German
defense ministry and its
role as prime contractor
for 22 Galileo GPS naviga-
tion and timing spacecraft
being built for the Europe-
an Union.
Airbus Defense and
Space is in the offing for
the OneWeb contract,
too. The company says
that making the cost of its
smallsat ofering meet Wy-
ler’s desired per-unit price
is difcult, but doable.
On the launch-vehicle
side, several service pro-
viders are stepping up to
bid for the job, which Wyler
says is expected to begin
launching in 2017. Space
Exploration Technologies
(SpaceX), the low-cost launch com-
pany that also plans to build and de-
ploy a constellation of 4,000 Internet
satellites in LEO, has demonstrated
its appeal to the smallsat market by
accommodating payloads on Falcon
9 cargo missions to the International
Space Station (ISS). Later this year,
SpaceX will lift 87 smallsats as piggy-
back payloads on a commercial Falcon
9 mission brokered by Spaceflight Inc.,
a startup company that pairs launches
of smallsats riding as secondary pay-
loads on other missions.
Spaceflight President Curt Blake
says India’s Polar Satellite Launch
Vehicle (PSLV) is also demonstrating
reliability for launching small satellites
to LEO, but the rocket’s accessibility
for U.S. commercial satellites and re-
lated components is unclear.
“For U.S. customers, there are re-
strictions on our ability to manifest on
PSLV,” Blake says. “We’ve been talking
to them to see if there might be some
way to do that. To have that ability
would be a big boon.”
European launch consortium Ari-
anespace, whose Vega smallsat vehi-
cle and European variant of the Rus-
sian Soyuz rocket have already lifted
smallsats as secondary payloads from
the Guiana Space Center in South
America, is also able to lift smallsat
missions on Soyuz from the Baikonur
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, whose
ruble-based cost structure may be
even more attractive, given the cur-
rency’s sharp decline on foreign ex-
change markets.
“We have Soyuz, but we can also
launch from Baikonur, and for small-
sats we have this additional possibility
to fulfill the requirements of our cus-
tomers,” Arianespace Chairman and
CEO Stephane Israel says. “If there is
a huge need for launchers, we have this
additional launch pad [along with] the
three in French Guiana.”
Arianespace recently won a contract
from Skybox Imaging to lift four of the
company’s 120-kg remote-sensing sat-
ellites to orbit as co-passengers on a
Vega rocket next year. Israel says by
2020 Arianespace will ofer the heavy-
lift Ariane 6.4 and medium-class Ari-
ane 6.2, noting that the latter will be
“perfectly adapted to the deployment
of small satellites.”
Virgin Galactic, which is designing a
vehicle that takes of from a runway anddelivers small satellites one
or two at a time to LEO, is
also in the hunt for the new
smallsat business. Virgin
Group Chairman Richard
Branson has announced
he is investing in OneWeb,
giving Virgin presumably
an inside track on at least
some of the company’s
launches for replacement
satellites.
Lockheed Martin is also
drawing interest from the
smallsat community for
the Jupiter space tug con-
cept it is bidding under
NASA’s second round of
commercial cargo con-
tract awards this year. Jim
Crocker, vice president
and general manager for
the space systems com-
pany’s new international
unit, says the Jupiter cargo
modules would have ample
room in the voluminous
unpressurized cargo hold
to carry smallsats that
could be dropped off in
LEO below the space station.
“The space station inclination
and orbit ofers an interesting place
in LEO for the smaller satellites to
go,” he says. “It’s also a predictable
ride; astronauts have to eat and they
need equipment, so there is a precise
schedule for delivery.”
Crocker says there is also the po-
tential to carry combinations of small
satellites with a propulsive stage that
use LEO as a drop-of point. “There
are people who would like to fly a sat-
ellite that actually has some delta v
associated with it, so they could go
somewhere else, but they’d get 80%
out of the gravity well on this ride,”
he says.
Phil Slack, president of Interna-
tional Launch Services (ILS), the
Reston, Virgina-based marketing
arm of Moscow’s Khrunichev State
Research and Space Production
Center, says he is already marketing
small satellite missions that will be
lofted by Russia’s new Angara 1 light
launcher from the Plesetsk Cosmo-
drome in northern Russia starting
in 2017. “We are actively looking for
single-core-version customers for
Angara 1 out of Plesetsk, where we
can lift 3 metric tons to LEO,” he
says. cSPACE 03B NETWORKSThales Alenia built 12 mobile
Ka-band satellites for O3b
Networks that operate in a unique
MEO orbit over the equator.