Bloomberg Businessweek - USA (2019-11-18)

43

November 18, 2019

Edited by

Dimitra Kessenides and

Benedikt Kammel

S O L U T I O N S

WOLFRAM SCHROLL/BLOOMBERG

Small Business

SatellitemakerOHBsays

buildinga launcheris thekey

togrowth

AGerman

FamilyBusiness

Embraces

RocketScience

Since the 1980s, a small German company

called OHB SE has built hundreds of satellites

for clients ranging from the German army to

scientific researchers. Within two years, OHB

plans to send satellites into orbit with its own

rockets—putting it into competition with giants

such as NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Airbus,

and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. “Without rockets, sat-

ellites are useless,” says Marco Fuchs, OHB’s

chief executive officer.

With satellites becoming ever smaller,

Fuchs sees an opportunity for OHB to be a

one-stop shop that builds spacecraft for cus-

tomers and then places them in the sky. And

the company has some experience manufac-

turing rocket parts as a subcontractor for the

European Ariane carrier rocket. The potential

is huge, with thousands of satellites planned

for launch in the coming decade. Operators

of small satellites often find themselves at

the mercy of launch-services providers, which

tend to place them on a sort of orbital standby

list, frequently bumped by bigger—and more

lucrative—cargo,andwhoserocketsoften

blastofffromdifficult-to-reach spaceports in

places such as Kazakhstan or French Guiana.

With about €1 billion ($1.1 billion) in sales last

year, the business has come a long way from

its early days, when Fuchs’s mother, Christa—

looking for something to do after the kids

OHBemployees

assemblea weather

satellitein Bremen

Hyperdrive