milestone
requirements."
The
commission has about 30 megahertz of S-band spectrum in each direction — ground
to space and vice versa — to give away to companies that meet
criteria including public service interest, coverage of all 27 European Union
nations and construction milestones that all
but Solaris may find impossible to respect, industry officials said. The
winning bids will receive 18-year licenses from the commission.
In addition
to Dublin, Ireland-based Solaris and ICO Global, the bidding companies that met
the European Commission's Oct. 7 filing deadline are TerreStar Europe Ltd. of London, a subsidiary of TerreStar Corp. of
Reston, Va.; and veteran mobile satellite services operator Inmarsat of London.
The
commission has set milestones that include a completed critical design review
of the applicants' satellite by February, and a launch in time to begin
operations in June 2011 — just 24 months after a final selection is made.
Eutelsat
and SES are spending a combined 150 million
euros ($206 million) to attach an S-band payload,
principally a large, unfurlable antenna, to the Eutelsat W2A satellite,
scheduled for launch in early 2009.
Steve
Maine, chief executive of Solaris Mobile, said the 150 million euros already
committed is sufficient to take the company through the third quarter of 2009,
including early operating costs of W2A. Maine said Solaris forecasts that more than 1 billion euros in revenue from
mobile television service will be generated in Europe in the next five years. Solaris is accenting mobile
television, but Maine said the satellite can be tasked to
provide radio and high-speed data links as well.
Inmarsat, also a profitable service
provider but in the L-band portion of the radio spectrum, is entering the S-band
competition to broaden its product line to offer dual-mode user devices to
capture Inmarsat's traditional L-band signal and the S-band frequency for
high-speed data.
Inmarsat
spokesman Christopher McLaughlin said mobile television and radio, and services
to government agencies, are also part of Inmarsat's S-band plans. The company
has a preliminary contract with Thales Alenia Space of Cannes, France, to build Inmarsat's Europa S-band satellite.
TerreStar,
which is building two large satellites for an S-band mobile service in North America, recently has contracted with Space
Systems/Loral of Palo
Alto, Calif., to build a TerreStar 3 satellite
for Europe, TerreStar Executive Vice President
Ben Gore said.
Gore said
an earlier TerreStar agreement with Astrium Satellites of Europe was shelved in
favor of Loral out of concern that the Astrium satellite would be too
sophisticated to be launched by the commission's mid-2011 deadline.
"It's a
challenging schedule," Gore said. He said Loral will be able to use a
design similar to the first TerreStar spacecraft to help keep to the deadline.
The first TerreStar satellite is scheduled for launch in mid-2009.
Gore said TerreStar's
European S-band business will be similar to its North American operation and
focus on delivering high-speed data to government agencies.
ICO Global
had promised its shareholders that it would challenge any European Commission
S-band licensing process that did not recognize ICO as an existing service
provider.
ICO
announced Oct. 8 that it would be entering the European Commission's selection
process but, in parallel, had initiated proceedings with the European Court of
First Instance to annul the procedure.
ICO
spokesman Christopher Doherty said ICO wants to force the commission to
"recognize ICO's legacy rights to S-band spectrum." ICO won British regulatory
approval for the 12-satellite system and was registered with the Geneva-based International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) as an operating system in 2004.
But because the company has failed
to launch the rest of the constellation, its British regulatory backing has
been eroding. Britain's Ofcom regulatory authority has
said it may take action to cancel ICO's ITU
registration. Doherty said Ofcom has agreed to await the results of the Boeing lawsuit
before taking action.
ICO is developing a separate
business in North
America using the ICO
G1 satellite that was launched into geostationary orbit earlier this year and
is operating under U.S. Federal Communications Commission regulatory authority.
ICO's satellite in medium Earth orbit was
never intended to provide the necessary coverage to win European regulatory
backing. ICO officials instead say they intend to launch the full 12-satellite
constellation they originally designed.
ICO has 10 partially built
satellites in storage and is battling with manufacturer Boeing Satellite
Systems International of El Segundo, Calif., over who bears responsibility for
the collapse of ICO's constellation contract with Boeing.
The Los Angeles county Superior Court
jury has been deliberating on the evidence since mid-September and is not
expected to return a verdict until Oct. 14 at the earliest.
[Back to the Top]
HUBBLE REPAIR DELAY PUTS ARES 1-X ACTIVITIES
ON HOLD
By BRIAN
BERGER
Space News Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — NASA's postponement of the Hubble
Space Telescope servicing mission until at least February is all but certain to
delay the first test flight of the U.S.
space agency's new astronaut-launching rocket.
NASA has
been targeting a late-spring launch out of Florida's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) of Ares 1-X, an early prototype of the
Ares 1 crew launch vehicle the agency intends to field in 2015. The Ares 1,
derived from the space shuttle solid-rocket motors, will be used to loft NASA's
planned Crew Exploration Vehicle into space.
But before
NASA can move ahead with the Ares 1-X flight, the agency first needs to make
some permanent modifications to a space shuttle launch pad that must remain
unchanged until after the Hubble repair mission.
Carol
Scott, NASA's Ares 1-X deputy mission manager at KSC, said the basic plan for
getting Launch Complex Pad 39B ready for Ares 1-X remains unchanged, but
acknowledged in an Oct. 3 interview that a schedule slip appears certain.
"We are all
going through schedule assessments especially now with the Hubble delay," Scott
said. "I do expect to have a new schedule coming out of that and then I believe
schedules will be adjusted at that point."
Although
senior NASA officials told reporters prior to the Hubble setback that the Ares
1-X flight likely would not launch before summer, the Ares 1 program and its
contractors have continued to target an April 15 launch date.
Scott said
a mid-April launch is no longer possible.
"Not with
the Hubble delays we have. We would not be able to meet an April 15 date," she
said.
Space
Shuttle Atlantis was positioned on Launch Complex Pad 39A with a full load of
spare parts awaiting its scheduled Oct. 14 launch toward Hubble when the
18-year-old space telescope experienced an onboard computer failure Sept. 27.
The glitch was serious enough that NASA wasted little time announcing that the
mission would have to be put off for several months.
NASA made
the call while a second space shuttle orbiter, Endeavour, was perched atop
neighboring Pad 39B being readied for a so-called launch-on-need rescue mission
agency officials hope will not be necessary. NASA rules require that for
shuttle missions to destinations other than the international space station, a
second orbiter must be ready to launch on a rescue mission should something go
wrong with the first.
Had the
Hubble repair mission lifted off in mid-October as planned, ground crews would
have gotten to work almost immediately washing down Atlantis' Mobile Launch
Platform and preparing the giant tracked vehicle for a number of modifications
needed to support the Ares 1-X flight. Meanwhile, once it was clear that Endeavour
would not be needed to rescue a stranded Hubble-repair crew, that orbiter would
be moved to Pad 39A for a mid-November launch to the space station. The Mobile
Launch Platform used for Atlantis' liftoff then would be rolled out to Pad 39B
where it would undergo a planned 10 weeks worth of modifications.
Ground
crews also would begin installation of a command, communications and control
system and swap out some interfaces between the pad and launch platform, all
while continuing to erect a new lightning tower tall enough to protect the
roughly 95-meter-tall rocket during the thunderstorms prevalent along the
Florida coast during warmer months.
Scott said
work on the lightning tower would not be affected by the Hubble delay. She also
said a number of key changes planned for the pad were not due to get under way
until January or February.
"We're
still in design phase so a lot of the [equipment] like the vehicle
stabilization system ... aren't slated to come here until April and that will not
be affected by Hubble," she said.
Scott said
it was too early to determine how much Ares 1-X would be delayed as a result of
Hubble's problems. The Ares program, she said, cannot replan the Ares 1-X work
until the space shuttle program nails down a new schedule for the Hubble repair
mission.
However,
Scott said she is hopeful that Hubble's delay will not result in a
month-for-month slip for Ares 1-X.
"Because
that's what KSC does best — they will go and reprioritize and reprogram to see
how they can still meet the earliest date. That's what we do here all the
time," she said.
Meanwhile,
Ares 1-X flight hardware is starting to ship from various points around the United States. NASA's Cleveland-based Glenn Research Center, for example, has finished construction
of an Ares 1-X dummy upper stage and plans to ship that hardware out before the
end of October.
Glenn
spokeswoman Katherine Martin said a media event is planned for Oct. 22 at the Ohio River port where the dummy rocket stage
will begin its journey down to KSC aboard the Delta Mariner, the same vessel
that carries Delta 4 rocket stages too big to travel over land.
Scott said
having the bulk of the rocket and new ground support hardware on hand before
pad modifications begin in earnest actually could permit KSC to work more
efficiently than otherwise might have been possible. This could keep a
five-month delay in handover of Pad 39B from translating into a five-month
delay in the launch of Ares 1-X.
"Hardware
deliveries will be at more opportune times within the schedule so we can do
more parallel work now than we could have," she said. "They probably will be
doing more work in parallel so they may be able to shorten the delay so it may
not be the same five-month delay."
[Back to the Top]
NEW KSC WORK EXPECTED TO LESSEN IMPACT OF POST-SHUTTLE LAYOFFS
By BRIAN BERGER
Space News Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — NASA is forecasting Kennedy Space
Center (KSC) will lose fewer jobs when the space shuttle retires than the
worst-case scenario figures the U.S.
space agency published in March.
NASA told
Congress earlier this year that a survey of space shuttle contractors showed
that as many as 6,400 workers could be given pink slips when the shuttle
retires from service in 2010. But NASA officials stressed that 6,400 was a
worst-case scenario that failed to take into consideration the hundreds or
thousands of new jobs that would be created at
Kennedy as NASA gets rolling on the new spacecraft and rockets it needs to
return to the Moon.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said
earlier this year that shuttle-related job losses likely would be closer to
3,000 to 4,000 once Constellation Program work was taken more fully into
consideration The second edition of a congressionally mandated shuttle work
force transition report NASA released Oct.
8 shows that Kennedy Space Center will shed approximately 4,500 full-time positions (NASA calls them work year
equivalents) between 2008 and 2011, the first year NASA expects to not be
flying the shuttle. By 2013, however, about 1,000 full-time positions could be added at KSC as
the Florida launch center's share of
Constellation work ramps up.
Joel Kearns, the NASA Space
Operations Mission Directorate's work force transition manager, in an Oct. 9
interview, attributed the rosier forecast for Kennedy-area contractors to
progress NASA has made since March in quantifying some of the
Constellation-related work to be performed there.
He said the
projections could continue to change as NASA updates its estimates to take into
account downstream Constellation projects for which contracts have yet to be
awarded.
"There's
not a lot of work related to Ares 5 and Altair lunar lander that's included in
this report because we don't even have the government estimates we can make
public to put in a report like this because they are all procurement
sensitive," Kearns said. "We have internal government estimates for what we are
going to buy but we can't put that in a public report because that would
violate federal acquisition regulations."
Kearns
pointed to the Oct. 6 release of a request for information from
contractors regarding the Altair work as an example of some of the steps NASA
is taking to firm up its plans for buying hardware beyond the Orion Crew
Exploration Vehicle and Ares 1 rocket already under contract.
He also said Kennedy's employment
forecast would become clearer as NASA gets closer to awarding a new ground
support services contract. A request for proposals is due out next spring or
summer with a contract award expected sometime in 2010. While NASA has some
idea of how many people it will need to support future launch operations, it
cannot telegraph this information to contractors gearing up to submit bids.
"That's one
of the difficulties we have in doing the work force transition report," Kearns said. "We want to show the work
force there are opportunities out there but ... in some ways we are hamstrung
when we do this report until we march further into the future and get more of
these contracts awarded."
Kennedy Space Center stands to be the hardest hit of all
NASA centers when it comes to shuttle-related job losses. NASA's Michoud
Assembly Facility in New
Orleans also stands
to lose a large number of jobs when production of space shuttle external tanks
comes to an end. Michoud's contractor payrolls are forecast to decline by about
40 percent during the next couple years, from 1,900
positions in 2008 down to 1,100 positions by 2010.
NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston could also lose jobs as the shuttle stops flying and
construction of the international space station comes to an end. Depending on
how much Constellation work ultimately is performed there, Johnson-area
contractors could find themselves with 400 to 2,200 fewer NASA positions to
staff in 2011 compared to 2008.
Marshall Space Flight Center — the Huntsville, Ala.-based center
responsible for Ares 1 — appears to be on a growth path with between 400 and
2,800 full-time positions expected to be added by 2013.
NASA's other field centers are
largely unaffected by the shuttle work force transition.
NASA is
required by a 2007 law to update the transition report twice a year.
[Back to the Top]
EUMETSAT APPROVES DESIGN FOR NEXT-GENERATION WEATHER SATELLITES
By BRIAN BERGER
Space News Staff Writer
PARIS — Europe's weather-satellite organization
approved the design of a Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) system to be launched
starting in 2015 and to include two identical satellite platforms carrying
separate suites of instruments.
Tentatively budgeted at 2.5 billion
euros ($3.75 billion), MTG will include construction of six satellites four
imaging spacecraft to be launched in sets of two, with one serving as backup to
the other; and two satellites equipped with infrared and near-infrared sounding
instruments that would be launched some eight years apart.
Meeting Oct. 9-10 in Darmstadt, Germany, the council of the 22-nation Eumetsat placed the MTG
process squarely in the path of the European Space Agency (ESA), whose
governments are scheduled to vote on their share of MTG at a Nov. 25-26 meeting
of ESA governments.
As was the case with the first two Meteosat
generations, MTG's first spacecraft will be designed by ESA, which will finance
70 percent of the construction and launch of the first imager and first sounder
satellites. Eumetsat governments said they would finance the remaining 30
percent of the first spacecraft.
Eumetsat is leaving it up to ESA to
determine the precise cost of the MTG prototype spacecraft, but ESA has
estimated that the total cost could approach 1 billion euros, with ESA paying
700 million euros of that.
If these
figures hold once the satellite construction and ground-segment contracts are
signed, that would put the MTG bill to Eumetsat at about 1.8 billion euros,
which is close to what the agency is paying for the Meteosat Second Generation
system now in orbit.
Four
second-generation Meteosats are being built, each with a seven-year operational
life in geostationary orbit. The fourth will be launched late enough to
continue in operation until 2015 to serve as a backup for the first MTG imaging
satellite.
The MTG spacecraft will be designed
to last eight years, and will represent a break from the earlier Meteosat
design, which has featured spin-stabilized platforms that rotate slowly in
orbit to maintain their position.
The MTG satellites will be
three-axis stabilized, and will be small enough to be launched by the European
version of Russia's Soyuz rocket, to be operated from Europe's Guiana Space
Center spaceport starting in 2010.
The operational
MTG system will feature two satellites with complementary payloads, another
difference from earlier Meteosat generations that partly reflects Eumetsat's
expanding role in environmental monitoring in addition to classic weather
forecasting.
The MTG
sounder satellites will include an ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared
sounder that will be part of ESA's Sentinel program of spaceborne sensors to be
launched as part of a broad Earth observation program called Kopernikus.
It remains unclear whether ESA will
structure the MTG contracting-bid competition to favor the selection of a
single company to build all six satellites, and thereby reduce per-satellite
costs.
The first imaging MTG satellite would
be launched in late 2015, assuming ESA and Eumetsat move quickly enough to
permit a contract to be signed in 2011. This contract date assumes that ESA, at
its meeting in November, approves a so-called Phase B MTG program that would
hone the design and lead to a contract proposal. The second imaging satellite
would be launched in 2020, the third in 2024 and the fourth and final model in
2028, providing uninterrupted MTG service for a 20-year period.
Each
satellite would be designed to last eight years in geostationary orbit and
could carry a principle imaging instrument, a lightning imager, a data
collection system and a sear-and-rescue payload to continue today's Cospas-Sarsat
service.
The first
MTG sounding satellite would be launched in 2018, with the
second launched in 2026.
Eumetsat
announced Oct. 10 that the council instructed Eumetsat Director-General Lars Prahm
and ESA to search for ways to "further present cost-saving options" for MTG.
[Back to the Top]
OHB USES GALILEO BID TO ESTABLISH CREDENTIALS AS A PRIME
By PETER B. de SELDING
Space News Staff Writer
GLASGOW, Scotland — OHB Technology is bidding against a
much larger consortium to build 28 Galileo navigation satellites as a signal to
European governments that the company should be viewed as a prime contractor,
OHB Chief Executive Marco Fuchs said.
But while
the Bremen, Germany-based company intends to
pursue the Galileo competition to the end, it is concerned that its bid may be
used simply to prevent the competing consortium, led by Astrium Satellites,
from bidding an overly high price.
"Obviously we are the outsider,
that's clear," Fuchs said here Oct. 1 at the International Astronautical
Congress. "The biggest concern we have is: Are we really just a rabbit to help
get a lower price from Astrium?"
OHB has
teamed with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. of Britain in its bid to build 28 Galileo satellites.
The
European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Commission are financing Galileo
and have set a budget of 3.4 billion euros ($4.7 billion) as total system costs
from 2007 through 2013, when the full constellation is expected to be in orbit.
Government
and industry officials say some of the Galileo satellite launches likely will
slip into 2014, if only because that is when the European Commission will have
fresh financing available in the event the system cannot meet the budget
target.
Astrium, teamed with Thales Alenia
Space of France and Italy, is building the four in-orbit validation Galileo
satellites to be launched in 2010. The consortium was established after long
negotiations with European governments on the roles of different component
builders, a way of assuring that ESA government contributors could be
guaranteed a return on their investment through work for their domestic
industries.
ESA and the
European Commission have said they want competitive bids wherever possible on Galileo, but they also say a case
can be made for selecting only one contractor for the entire constellation.
"If ESA has
to oversee two industrial teams building satellites, it adds costs," said one
government official involved in Galileo. "Having two teams also means you
reduce your chance of getting economies of scale that you would expect if you
gave one team all 28 satellites."
Fuchs
agreed that, to defend its chances, OHB will have to persuade ESA that whatever
additional costs there are in selecting two contractors, there also will be
long-term savings.
"In the
short term, having two teams costs more but dual sourcing is much more
attractive to the taxpayers in the long term," Fuchs said. "Also, having a
redundancy built into the system with two prime contractors has an advantage,
as we have seen with the two experimental satellites."
Surrey Satellite Technology and the Astrium-led
consortium each built one experimental Galileo satellite. Surrey's was finished first and permitted Europe to preserve Galileo signal frequencies
with international regulators. Both satellites now are operating in medium Earth
orbit.
OHB and Astrium are scheduled to
present preliminary bids by Nov. 7, with ESA then managing an increasingly
detailed series of negotiations with both teams — ESA uses the term
"competitive dialogue" to describe the process — until selecting the winner in
mid-2009.
How far
apart the OHB and Astrium proposals will be in price is unclear. Because of the
limited supplier base in Europe, the two teams will be soliciting
bids from many of the same component manufacturers, which presumably will
submit the same prices to both the prime contractor teams.
OHB has
been growing its space business by making acquisitions in recent years and,
with Galileo, finds itself in a situation similar to where it was in 2001 with
a German Defense Ministry contract to build five identical SAR-Lupe radar
reconnaissance satellites.
OHB was a
clear underdog in the competition, facing off against a well-proven Astrium
team. But the company won the contract and since has overseen the successful
construction and launch of the SAR-Lupe constellation. More recently, OHB has
secured German government backing to promote an ESA program, called Small-GEO,
to design a small commercial telecommunications satellite platform, bringing
OHB squarely into the commercial satellite market. Satellite-fleet operator Hispasat
is the first customer for the Small-GEO platform.
For
Galileo, Fuchs said the company will be spending perhaps 2 million euros on preparing the bid documentation
and negotiating with ESA and with component suppliers.
"We will
stay in the race until the end," Fuchs said. "The risk for us is not that high:
If we don't get any of the work, we have still made an investment that will
serve us in the future. The goal here is to position ourselves in Europe to be viewed by ESA as a prime
contractor. This is strategic for us."
[Back to the Top]