High Promise for Hosted Payloads

Written by Adam Baddeley

MIT 2010 Volume: 14 Issue: 2 (March)

Hosted payloads are not going to be the answer to every government satellite problem. Nevertheless, they are potentially beneficial to the government, being very cost-effective and faster to launch, with the consequence that numerous payloads can be placed in orbit, creating widely distributed systems and high levels of redundancy.

In just one sign of that growing interest, the Satellite 2010 conference is scheduled to include a session entitled “Hosted Payloads: A New Model for Commercial/Military Cooperation.”

“Once considered anathema, the commingling of commercial with military, imaging, and national security assets on a single spacecraft has become the wave of the future, and that future is now,” the session description stated. “Technicians, engineers and executives on the commercial side of the equation see such capacity as a solid tenant and strong revenue stream. On the government side, planners see hosted payloads as an effective and potentially time-sensitive approach to orbiting critical assets without covering all the expense.”

A number of companies are supporting the government efforts with initial work showing that secondary payloads can be put on spacecraft at very modest cost, with considerable opportunities to do so predicted in the future.

Military leaders are also voicing tentative interest in the concept. One is Lieutenant General Larry James, commander, 14th Air Force (Air Forces Strategic), Air Force Space Command, and commander, Joint Functional Component Command for Space, U.S. Strategic Command, who touched on it in remarks at a recent conference.

Discussing the mix of military and commercial capabilities within the overall DoD space strategy, James said, “We are asking for the best ideas from industry to understand what is the proper mix [of SATCOM capabilities], as well as looking to the future at the protected capabilities that commercial industry is going to have then, and how that fits into the protected and assured capabilities that we are building with AEHF, WGS and whatever system comes out in the future.

“As an aside, in several meetings over the past year with commercial providers, many of them have offered up the possibility of hosting various payloads on their particular satellites,” James continued. “If you have a commercial satellite with the size, weight and power capabilities for hosted payloads, how do we take advantage of that? Should that be some form of MILSATCOM payload we put on? Should it be a space situational awareness sensor? How should that support our communication requirement? We don’t have the answers to that yet.

“It is a different dynamic today that it was 10 years ago. In general, we did not then have the capacity to have two payloads on commercial satellites. Now that industry is offering that up, how do we take advantage of that to potentially meet some of our needs? I don’t necessarily have a crystal ball or the answers, but we have lot of activity in place right now to help us to define that in the next four to six months, and then we will move forward from there,” he added.

DEVELOPMENT TEMPO

Intelsat General is one of the companies that see hosted payloads as an opportunity for government space operators facing challenges in their schedule, budget and systems diversity. “They offer the operator the ability to rapidly get on orbit, to build distributed capability in space, and to mitigate the challenges of constrained government launch systems,” said Don Brown, the company’s vice president for hosted payloads. “Intelsat is constantly refreshing the fleet, which has over 50 satellites in geo-synchronous orbit today. In order to maintain that fleet, we buy and launch, on average, two to four spacecraft each year. Each of those spacecraft is a potential host for a government payload.”

Timing is everything when planning hosted payloads, Brown commented.

“The challenge, in our experience with hosted payloads, is matching the government’s payload development schedule with the rapid tempo of commercial space operations. You have government space planners who are accustomed to long planning development cycles whereas commercial operators work on a different timescale. We have to be innovative and work to merge the two.”

Military timeframes need not always be secondary to commercial schedules, he said. “There is a reverse model, where the payload drives the schedule of a commercial spacecraft that may not have an immediate onorbit requirement. The commercial satellite industry is willing to be creative and establish a structure that flips the model to accommodate different types of payloads.”

Addressing military and government security concerns, Brown argued that Intelsat has always had and continues to have very high level security within its systems. Intelsat General has decades of experience in supporting dedicated government missions, such as the LEASAT satellites for the Navy and the earlier MARISAT satellite, both military UHF payloads.

For specific military concerns about the payload’s command and control, the hosted payload can be entirely controlled and operated by the government, Brown explained.

A key point in the current surge of hosted payload development is the Internet routing in space (IRIS) program, which has been jointly undertaken by DoD and industry as a joint capability technology demonstration (JCTD). Hosted on the Intelsat IS-14 satellite, which covers Europe, Africa and the Americas, IRIS includes a Cisco-sourced router connected to one C-band and two Ku-band transponders. IRIS looks to enable next-generation, IP-based communications capabilities.

IRIS was launched at the end of November and has passed initial in-orbit testing successfully, Brown reported.

“Cisco has started a series of more detailed tests on the systems, and the government JCTD on-orbit phase is about to begin. All indications are that IRIS is working very well, and we look forward to Cisco’s upcoming announcement of their tests of the IRIS capabilities with live traffic.”

Outside of the U.S., expressly military payloads are well on their way to orbit as hosted payloads. Intelsat signed a contract with the Australian Defence Force in April 2009 to launch a military UHF payload on IS-22 in early 2012. Brown said that the company is standing firm on that deadline, which would represent a major improvement on conventional military MILSATCOM schedules.

“The Australians are very smart at space capability acquisition,” Brown said, “and the approach they are taking could be a model for future UHF capabilities for the U.S.”

INFRARED PAYLOAD

A big part of Air Force exploration of the potential hosted payloads is encompassed within the commercially hosted infrared payload (CHIRP) program. Americom Government Services (AGS) announced its selection as the lead for that initiative by the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center in 2008.

The program involves AGS working with sensor developer SAIC and payload integrator Orbital Sciences for use onboard an SES Americom spacecraft. Testing of the CHIRP payload is now nearing completion, with delivery to SES, the spacecraft integrator, ready for launch next year.

“The whole idea of a hosted payload on a commercial spacecraft is that it is not the primary mission payload but a secondary hosted payload that would be integrated with another mission,” explained Air Force Brigadier General Robert “Tip” Osterthaler (Ret.), chief executive officer of AGS. “You start with a commercial business case that requires a spacecraft in a specific orbital location at a specific point in time for a commercial mission. The spacecraft we are using just happened to dovetail with the availability of the CHIRP payload. These two things came together, and are probably going to stay together through a successful launch next year.”

The primary payload on the CHIRP spacecraft is a combined commercial Kuand C-band payload, which will be used for whole variety of media, enterprise and government customers. That payload makes things unquestionably cheaper, relative to a dedicated military alternative.

In the case of CHIRP, government estimates found that for more than a 100 test deliverables on which the government wanted to determine its performance, 85 percent of those deliverables could be done by just integrating the payload onto an orbital spacecraft. The total cost compared to a government launch at that time was estimated to be about 15 percent of what it would be to put it on a commercial space craft.

One of the major differences between government and commercial satellite programs is the way platforms are purchased, which lends itself to easier integration of hosted payloads on the latter.

“Commercial operators generally buy, configure and launch spacecraft one at a time,” said Osterthaler. “It will have a customer-designed payload, usually for a specific mission and operating location. Because we buy spacecraft one at a time, we can introduce hosted payloads onto a spacecraft because each spacecraft is in a sense a one-off. When the government buys satellites, they block-buy satellites and introduce configuration control. It then becomes very difficult to make modifications to just one item in a production string without causing scheduling and cost increases.”

CHIRP is hosting a wide field-of-view sensor payload on a geosynchronous communications satellite. That is traditionally not a suitable orbit for operational sensor payloads, Osterthaler noted, but that is changing.

“GEO is the only place that companies like SES operate. However, I think that the reality of the development of sensors is that certain sensors, such as IR, are at such an advanced stage of development that we believe that we can viably operate from that orbit. As far as I am aware, there are not any optical sensors that are quite to that stage of development,” he said.

Addressing further government projects for hosted payloads in the U.S., Osterthaler described a number of future initiatives. “We are working on a variety of sensors that could be used for space situational awareness, to have a better picture of operating conditions in the various orbital arcs, particularly the GEO arc, because that is now a very crowded place. We believe that there is a lot of potential to carry these, and we are working with the government to try and define what such GEO systems might look like.

“We are also looking at various capabilities that we might be able to build into our future spacecraft that might fill some of the capability gaps that are being left by the cancellation of TSAT. This includes some non-traditional capacity such as government frequencies such as military Ka band that we might carry if there is sufficient government demand,” he added.

There are trade-offs in any spacecraft between how much capacity is built in and how the cost is driven down. Commercial satellite firms are not intending to compete with traditional builders of large custom-built satellites for the military, Osterthaler noted.

“We are more interested in doing the thing that we know we can do economically and within schedule limits,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we can’t add special features. For example, we have implemented NSA-type command link encryption on board our spacecraft so that they cannot be taken over by third parties.

“It is technically within the realm of the possible for commercial spacecraft, but it is up to the government to tell us if those capabilities are sufficiently important that we should invest in them, because they don’t necessarily have much utility for commercial missions. I think we could do almost anything that the government would want, but they just have to tell us in clear terms what they want so we can do an economic analysis,” he said.

PARADIGM SHIFT

In Space Systems/Loral’s (SS/L) roughly 50-year presence in the satellite market, it has become the world’s leading provider of commercial GEO satellites, launching 12 satellites over the last two years, according to Arnold Friedman, senior vice president of marketing and sales. The company has indirectly supported the U.S. government via companies such as Intelsat and XTAR. Today, Friedman explained, some 25 percent of the commercial capacity used by the military is over SS/L-sourced satellites. “Hosted payloads provid

e great opportunities for government agencies, and we are seeing a lot of interest in the advantages of placing them on our satellites,” Friedman said. “We launch satellites in two to three years, but government programs can take much longer. Ten years from now, I believe the government will have a network of hosted payloads to complement its highly secure national systems. They are also likely to procure high capacity commercial satellites directly. These commercial satellites can be tailored to more specifically meet government needs.”

A number of customers for the hosted payload approach have already been racked up and capability deployed, including the IRIS project, which was launched on a SS/L-built satellite.

Outside the U.S., SS/L is currently building a hosted payload on an SES satellite for the European Union’s European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service. In addition, a hosted military payload for the Australian Defence Force was included on the Optus C1 SATCOM program, while Japan and SS/L have successfully worked together on hosted payloads supporting air traffic control and weather forecasting on a satellite called MTSAT-1R.

“It is really a paradigm shift for the U.S. government to have their payloads packaged in this way,” Friedman said. “To date, the U.S. has primarily used its own dedicated satellites, and when they need commercial support, they lease it. However, some government missions don’t require nuclear-hardened satellites, and that is why a lot of traffic goes over commercial satellites today. We are looking at complementing the government programs to meet both urgent and future demand. I don’t expect hosted payloads to replace all satellites used for national security, but there are cases where they provide the best value solution.”

SS/L is pursuing several categories of hosted payloads, including space situational awareness, space weather, missile warning, climate/ weather/ocean monitoring, space science, experimental/ demonstration payloads and GPS augmentation.

In the wake of last year’s cancellation of the transformational satellite program, implementing a similar capability via a hosted payload approach could fill the predicated bandwidth gap later this decade, Friedman suggested.

It’s not just cost and schedule that is attracting DoD to hosted payloads, he continued, but also the fact that expanding the number of military payloads in orbit builds in redundancy and resilience. “Having more satellite locations gives the military more reliability and security, because they are not all dependent on one big satellite. A distributed network provides benefits as far as security and reliability because, as you have more nodes, the enemy would have to jam more locations to disrupt or intercept communications.

“We think that there will be a subset of government requirements that will be hosted on a lot of different satellites. That is one of the reasons why DoD uses commercial satellites today. They are distributed, there are many nodes and they have a lot of capacity,” he said.

“The satellite community is willing to commit to whatever the government needs, as long as the government can make a long-term commitment,” said Friedman. ♦

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