Leaders See Collaboration as the Key to Expanding Access to Space

Global cooperation in space, both between nations and between government and commercial efforts, is the key to a resilient and sustainable future for the sector, panelists told SATELLITE attendees Wednesday.

“We're seeing a lot of discussions on collaboration, and does every country need to put up their own constellation, or can [groups of countries] have a collaborative constellation that offers global coverage? I think that's a really exciting discussion,” said Michelle Parker, vice president of Space Missions, Systems Defense, Space & Security at Boeing.

Such collaboration would mean nations effectively splitting the cost of launching, maintaining, and operating a constellation, and making it affordable for smaller nations, she said.

Parker added she is seeing a lot of discussions around inter-orbital interoperability, and multi-orbit constellations. “We think Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) is a great sweet spot,” she said.

Boeing is working with satellite operator SES to deploy the O3b mPOWER constellation to MEO, with eight satellites currently in space.

Multi-orbit constellations “give us an opportunity to put the right mission in the right place, and to get great capability in a blended environment with a lot of partners using the same constellation,” she explained. It “could help from a sustainability aspect as well, to not have everybody with their own individual constellation.”

The European Union had already signed contracts for the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²), a multi-orbit constellation which will eventually grow to 290 satellites, said Laurent Jaffart, director of Connectivity and Secure Communications, for the European Space Agency (ESA).

The basis for IRIS² was a set of existing space assets, governmental Geostationary Orbit (GEO) communications satellites, Jaffart said, which will be integrated with emerging and evolving commercial capabilities “to deliver sovereign, autonomous, secured connectivity to governmental users in Europe.”

That same principle of allies sharing capabilities underlaid the Combined Space Operations Initiative (CSpO), founded a decade ago to facilitate the integration of the space capabilities of the U.S. and its closest allies, said retired Space Force Maj. Gen. Clint Crosier.

Crosier, who led CSpO, explained how it grew from originally just the Five Eyes, the U.S. and four intelligence partners, Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, in 2014.

Today, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Norway are also members. All the nations involved recognized the need to join forces to maximize their strength in the new domain, said Crosier, now director of Aerospace and Satellite Solutions for Amazon Web Services.

“All of those countries recognize that even though we all value our own sovereignty, none of us had the capabilities individually to meet the overall mission requirement, and we're much better off sharing data, sharing information, sharing systems,” Crosier said.

With the reduced but still very considerable costs of developing, launching, and maintaining space assets and space capabilities, said Crosier, “A coalition of like-minded nations or like-minded organizations is always going to be more effective than trying to go it alone.”

The U.S. provided the infrastructure that allowed CSpO allies to integrate their operations, Crosier said, urging them to use a standards based approach to integration. “You have to operate on a standard system, whether it's for command and control or for data integration,” he said.

When Crosier commanded Schriever Space Force Base, he said, the base included a ground station, built to run the U.S. military’s Global Positioning by Satellite (GPS) system. “I had an entirely separate command and control system and ground station capability for military satcom.”

Even just with two fleets that was duplicative, let alone what such siloing would mean as the military moves into proliferated Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations and multi-domain, multi-orbit communications. “We have to integrate all those capabilities. We have to integrate common ground systems standards, common command and control capabilities, common data integration.”

Amazon’s play was called the CMOC, a cloud-based mission operations center, with a virtualized network in the AWS cloud. Capella Space, an Earth Observation company, had a CMOC, said Crosier. “They run all their command and control in the cloud, such that they could operate it from their primary ops center, or from a resilient [back up] operations center. They could set up an operations center here in this hotel, in the back room, and get command and control and constellation management that allows real integration with whatever organization you want to integrate with at whatever location you need,” he said.

The CSpO initiative generates and improves cooperation and coordination of national security space activities. It has grown to ten partners: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

Another possibility was “constellation-as-a-service,” said Hamdullah Mohib, CEO of Marlan Space, a satellite builder and operator based in and partially financed by the United Arab Emirates.

“Not everybody needs to own a constellation,” he added. With the constellation-as-a-service model, Marlan bears the capital and startup costs of launching a constellation, and all of the company's customers split the ongoing costs of operating the constellation. And those customers might include other nations, as well, Mohib said.

“The world is getting more fragmented, geopolitically, and countries want to have some guarantee, as they depend more and more on space, that they have resilient infrastructure that can ensure the continuity of their needs,” he said.

The company is building a facility in Abu Dhabi with the capacity to build up to 50 satellites a year.

“We think a lot of the demand will be driven by not just the UAE, but other countries in the region and also in Southeast Asia,” who are looking for guaranteed access to space at a price they can afford, and want to be a in a country where they don’t have to “play the geopolitical game,” he said.

The cost of satellites and the cost of launching them have tumbled dramatically over the years, but remained very expensive.

“Not many countries can afford to get to space,” he said. “There are only going to be a handful of players, and we're positioning ourselves to be one of those players in the market.” VS