A Blue Ocean Market for Commercial Space Data Relay Services

Five years ago, satellite communications provider Viasat wrote a white paper that was jokingly called “Streaming Netflix to the International Space Station," meant as a call to action for NASA to take advantage of new opportunities ahead for commercial relay networks.

The agency is now answering that call, soliciting commercial operators to demonstrate new constellations and networks that could provide real-time communications in space, under a public-private partnership model that is cost-efficient for the government, and supports industry investments in new architectures and initiatives.

Technological breakthroughs including optical intersatellite links (OISLs) and smaller form factor components, alongside economical factors like reduced cost of launch, are pushing commercial companies to take new risks. Meanwhile, government agencies are taking advantage of off-the-shelf technology for space applications.

NASA’s Bet on Commercial Services

Within the next decade, NASA could be using commercial services to enable its next-generation satellite communications constellation that will provide connectivity to the International Space Station (ISS), as well as various science missions.

The Communications Services Project (CSP) will demonstrate the feasibility of commercial satcom for NASA’s missions, specifically to replace its aging Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system. First launched in the 1980s, TDRS was built to support NASA’s human spaceflight missions and ensure continuous coverage, and includes six satellites in Geostationary Orbit (GEO). The last TDRS satellite was launched in 2017.

In April, the agency awarded a cumulative $278.5 million in contracts for CSP’s Phase 2, where the six selected teams will work with NASA to demonstrate their proposed solutions over the next five years. Those partners include: Inmarsat Government, Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Government Solutions, SES Government Solutions, SpaceX, Telesat U.S. Services, and Viasat.

After the demos end, NASA will launch Phase 3, with plans to acquire commercial satcom services and have an operational system in place by 2030. Other companies aside from the six partners selected for Phase 2 will be able to compete for the Phase 3 services contract.

NASA wants to see an end-to-end operational capability, achieved in Phase 2, not just a technology demo, says Eli Naffah, CSP formulation manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

He expects to see improved performance and the ability to capture tech advances of the last 30 to 40 years. Automation will be key, he says. “Right now, it takes three weeks to schedule a TDRS contact, and we would really hope to be able to have an ubiquitous service at some point, a service on demand.” Optical satellite linking will be considered as well, as that’s a capability TDRS can’t do, he adds.

The six companies are coming into the NASA program with a broad spectrum of proposed solutions. SpaceX and Kuiper each proposed an optical Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) relay network for high-rate communications, while SES’s solution includes radio frequency (RF) Geostationary C-band and Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) Ka-band relay networks for high- and- low-rate communications.

Inmarsat submitted a proposal for commercial RF GEO-based relay capabilities called InRange and InCommand, that leverage the company’s L-band GEO satellite network Elera. The approach is informed by a series of efforts including the 2020 demonstration of an intersatellite data relay system linking Inmarsat’s I-4 GEO satellites to LEO-based Capella Space Sequoia satellites. The InRange and InCommand capabilities proposed for NASA CSP allow satellites stationed in LEO to stay in continuous communication with ground stations, and transmit data in real time.

Meanwhile, Telesat’s proposal centers around its nascent Telesat Lightspeed LEO constellation, comprising nearly 200 satellites. The U.S. subsidiary of Canada-headquartered Telesat partnered with Planet Labs to co-develop Ka-band terminals, to be hosted on two of Planet’s Earth observation (EO) spacecraft, says Tom Eaton, president of Telesat Government Solutions.

While Planet conducts their data imagery missions, the onboard Ka-band terminal will transmit to a Lightspeed satellite. The Lightspeed satellites are all connected via OISLs, providing “a backbone at 1,000 kilometers,” Eaton says. Over the next four years, Telesat will focus on building out its Lightspeed constellation, and developing the RF terminal alongside Planet.

Viasat plans to demonstrate its imminent ViaSat-3 constellation. The RF Geostationary Ka-band network would relay data from LEO satellites to the three new GEO-based satellites, then down to the company’s Internet-connected ground network. The first ViaSat-3 bird is scheduled to launch in late 2022.

The solution stems from Viasat’s existing capabilities used for inflight connectivity, and the new GEO-based systems “will basically treat any LEO satellite almost like an airplane,” says Craig Miller, president of Viasat Government Systems. Viasat-3 will be able to keep in touch with many smallsats in LEO simultaneously no matter where they are in orbit – over an ocean, or over the North Pole, he adds.

NASA explicitly wanted to tap into the private sector innovation happening in space at the moment, and to invest in a system that has other, existing customers, says Naffah. When the CSP program was launched, “we really weren’t sure what we would get from industry."

“The reason we awarded six was because industry stepped up,” he adds.

The agency’s commitment to CSP is $278 million of Funded Space Act agreements; meanwhile, the CSP industry partners are providing a cost share of over $1.5 billion. “To me, that was a lot of confirmation that this is really something that they believe in from a business standpoint,” says Naffah.

Companies involved in the CSP program lauded the way NASA wants to be a partner with its contractors, not just a buyer, and the emphasis on ensuring the network it ultimately selects has long-term viability. “If NASA didn't exist, we would still be deploying this capability,” says Viasat’s Miller.

Partnerships Across Governments

NASA is one of several government organizations that are investing in space data relay networks, and the Defense Department in particular is funding new efforts to launch proliferated LEO constellations for on-demand connectivity. While there are no joint programs across government offices, NASA is engaged with the U.S. Space Force and other government entities, Naffah says.

Telesat is participating in both the CSP Phase 2 effort, as well as programs within the DoD’s Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create a proliferated-LEO network. While the end goals differ, Telesat is leveraging its investments made for DARPA’s Project Blackjack program, and the SDA’s National Defense Space Architecture, on the NASA program, says Eaton.

Space data relay collaboration could one day go global. European and Canadian companies are partnering with the European Space Agency (ESA) to take the next steps in optical communication via the High Throughput Optical Network project, also known as HyDRON. ESA member nations will decide in November how to move forward with the HyDRON demonstration phase, with the plan to exhibit an optical “fiber in the sky” within the next five years, per the agency.

NASA could collaborate with ESA at some point on in-space data relay networks, but “that’s future work for us,” says Naffah.

Where Are the Markets?

Thousands of new satellites are coming online to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for science missions, military efforts, climate change mitigation, or for agriculture and oil and gas sectors.

Stakeholders see commercial applications including remote sensing, human spaceflight, and in-orbit servicing taking the biggest share of in-space data relay services, but the government contracts, mostly for the military and intelligence community, will bring in the most revenue.

For any new space companies developing data relay services, the government is still going to be the big customer, and also the way forward to ramp up initial funding, says Shivaprakash Muruganandham, a consultant for NSR. “It’s going to be very tricky for a data relay operator to focus only on commercial customers,” he notes.

But the value of commercial in-space data relay is becoming more apparent. The ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and the ways news outlets and other observers have used EO data to track real-time troop movements, weapons inventory, and damage assessments, “illuminated that there are these commercial capabilities that can be used in other ways,” says Viasat’s Miller.

Some satcom providers are looking at how onboard data processing can enable high-bandwidth space data relay. SpaceLink is developing a constellation of four satellites based in MEO that employs optical intersatellite links to relay data from LEO-based systems up to MEO, and then use RF links to send the data down to the company’s ground gateways.

The SpaceLink roadmap is to provide a 10 Terabytes-per-second orbiting optical cloud, says CEO Dave Bettinger. Advanced regenerative payloads for on-board communications processing, and edge computing and storage will be critical technology enablers for SpaceLink’s space data relay roadmap, he adds.

In-orbit servicing will also benefit from on-demand connectivity provided by such systems. Singapore-based terminal provider Addvalue wants to help bring satellites correctly and precisely to where they need to be in orbit, says Khai Pang Tan, Addvalue CEO and co-founder. Real-time connectivity could also contribute to space debris management, he adds – a critical need as over 30,000 pieces of space debris have been recorded as of spring 2022, according to ESA.

Technology Enablers for In-Space Data Relay

Looking back 20 years ago, NASA helped to encourage the tremendous innovation happening now in satellite communications, says Naffah.

“We had an advanced communications technology satellite that NASA sponsored with industry to open up the Ka-band and broadband capabilities, and a lot of the onboard processing that we’re looking at now,” he notes. “That spurred a huge growth for direct TV, for broadband, especially in the Ka-band arena. Industry is now far outpacing NASA in that area.”

The continuation of Moore’s Law has been a significant factor in the growth of in-space applications, operators agree. Launching much more capable networks with smaller size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements will open up business cases for in-orbit manufacturing, and even pharmaceutical product development where microgravity and the hard vacuum of space is needed, says SpaceLink’s Bettinger.

The CSP program and others can take advantage of the nascent use of OISLs for data transfer, as well as the proven reliability of RF links. Operators foresee that different bands of use for intersatellite links, including RF and optical, will be important to get the data rates customers are asking for.

Optical intersatellite links have many advantages, such as high data throughput rates, lower size, weight, and power needs, and higher security benefits due to their smaller beam footprint, per NSR’s Muruganandham. For now, OISL users don’t have to worry about spectrum regulation the same way that RF operators do.

On the flip side, radio frequency links have been in use for decades and are well-established, while optical intersatellite links still require standardization to become more ubiquitous, he adds. Newer upstarts are drawn to OISLs “because as an early stage company, the competitive advantage they bring is the ability to link across a mesh network.”

Getting the right partnerships in place will be quite important for space data relay companies, per Muruganandham, especially with the terminal manufacturers and ground network operators. “This is a system that needs to be really well integrated into your network,” he notes. “Getting that entire chain set up is quite important, and it’s much more doable today with cloud players coming into the picture.”

As encouraged as satellite operators are by the future of space data relay, they acknowledge ongoing challenges, namely in the area of frequency regulation and intersatellite link standardization.

NASA is interested in how ISLs can provide real-time communications under the CSP program, but there needs to be an established standard for the technology to be truly viable for the government, notes Naffah. The Space Development Agency in August 2021 finalized its own optical communications terminal standard for use in its proliferated LEO-based National Defense Space Architecture, but to date, no standard similar to the IEEE 802.11 standard for Wi-Fi has been widely adopted.

The radio frequency world continues to have its own headaches, as congestion in the higher frequency ranges is only getting worse. “The higher you go, you need to point very carefully to GEO and clear a lot of interference,” notes Addvalue’s Tan.

Once more satellite constellations providing space data relay come online, the question of interoperability will come into play. NASA sees a potential benefit for interoperable data relay systems to offer additional resiliency, but it’s not quite reality yet, says Naffah. “There’s baby steps. First, we need to have services,” he says.

While several challenges remain to fully implement space data relay, operators are seeing a shift from government-led to commercial-led initiatives, and a blue ocean market ahead for space data relay – one that is nascent and for now, underserved – in a way that hasn’t been seen for decades. VS

Vivienne Machi is an award- winning reporter based in Stuttgart, Germany.