A round-up of news briefs that featured in Issue 199 of SatelliteFinance.
A round-up of news briefs that featured in Issue 198 of SatelliteFinance.
SATELLITE OPERATORS
The launch of MSS operator Iridium Communications’ NEXT constellation has hit another snag after Kosmotras cancelled the April launch of its first batch of smallsats.
The launch provider said it is yet to receive the necessary approvals from the Russian Ministry of Defence to launch Iridium’s payload from Yasney on a Dnepr rocket.
However, Iridium CEO Matt Desch said SpaceX had agreed to move forward its NEXT launch, meaning the operator should be able to get a first batch of satellites into orbit in July.
Last October Iridium had to push back the first launch from December 2015 to April this year after Thales Alenia Space, which is building the next-generation satellites, found a component was faulty. Speaking on a quarterly investor call in late February, Desch said the NEXT constellation would still be completed in 2017 as scheduled, and said the change did not require any modifications to its Coface-backed credit facility or any new regulatory approvals.
Iridium recorded a US$69.4m net loss for Q4 2015, which it pinned squarely on its commercial voice and data business citing a challenging macroeconomic environment, down from US$23m in income for the same quarter in 2014.
Spanish operator Hispasat has renamed the majority of its satellites so that their designations are logically structured and informative as its fleet expands. All satellites will use Hispasat as their first name, which will be followed by their orbital slot and their order of arrival, putting the satellites into their historical context. The Amazonas satellites are the exception to Hispasat’s new rule with the company retaining that moniker, reasoning that they are fully established and well-known by the market.
SPACE SERVICES
Harris Corporation has taken a US$367m non-cash write-down of goodwill and other assets due to the poor performance of VSAT subsidiary Harris CapRock Communications.
The prolonged downturn in the energy market was blamed for CapRock’s poor performance and Harris has moved to restructure the unit, closing facilities and cutting 20% of its workforce as it looks to “right size” the business.
Speaking on its Q2 investor call in February, Harris CEO William Brown said its plan was to diversify the satcoms provider away from energy and towards the cruise ship market.
“Over the last two years, bandwidth demand on cruise ships has increased exponentially from an average of less than five megabits per ship to now 35 megabits, with one gigabit insight for the largest vessels,” Brown said. The CEO also noted that the diversification brought CapRock “significant volume leverage for purchasing satellite bandwidth” from satellite operators, such as Telenor Satellite which supplies CapRock and has put a fresh emphasis on selling to the maritime VSAT market.
Harris’s Q2 revenues reached US$1.84bn, a significant increase on the US$1.21bn from Q2 2015 and largely explained by the completion of its acquisition of Exelis last summer, which more than doubled the revenues in Harris’s space and intelligence systems and electronic systems units.
The total assets of the critical networks division, which CapRock is a part of, fell from US$3.49bn to US$2.99bn between July 2015 and January 2016. Harris snapped up CapRock from Abry Partners in 2010 for US$525m for an EBITDA multiple of 9.7x. The acquisition was made with a view to entering the energy market, which was attractive to it at the time.
SPACE SEGMENT
Companies managed by Ukraine’s state-owned space agency have potentially lost 80% of their revenues due to Russia cancelling contracts in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, according to a report from the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF, which is looking at ways to reform Ukraine’s state-owned enterprises to improve the country’s economy, estimated the cancellations amounted to a loss of around US$74m per year.
One notable casualty of the fallout between Russia and Ukraine is the Zenit rocket, a collaboration between the two countries used by launch provider Sea Launch.
Production has halted on the rocket due to the ongoing hostilities between the countries, and Russian news agency TASS has reported that Zenit cannot be launched without the assistance of Ukrainian specialists.
Orbital ATK has opened a regional office in Singapore following on from expanding its presence in the UK, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as it looks to ramp up international sales.
Tim Shephard, head of international business development at Orbital ATK, said: “Already, about 20% of the company’s sales are to international customers and we are seeking further growth in these important markets.”
Shephard said Orbital ATK had secured around US$750m in new sales in Asia over the past five years, which gave it confidence to invest more in the region. Bill Rose, Orbital ATK’s senior regional director of Asia Pacific, will head up the new outpost.
Iran’s plans to develop a remote Earth sensing satellite have taken another step forward after an executive at Russian manufacturer VNIIEM, which is building the system, said they were close to agreeing a launch contract.
Leonid Macridenko was quoted by Russian state media as saying the launch could be agreed by mid-April, and the system could be placed into orbit by Russia at the end of 2018. Iran has been trying to develop its space capabilities over recent years and is now tipped to push into the commercial satellite market following the lifting of economic sanctions.
GROUND SEGMENT
The Federal Communications Commission has voted to examine opening up the US set-top market, meaning pay-TV subscribers would no longer be obliged to lease boxes from their provider. The regulator said 99% of pay-TV subscribers are currently chained to their set-top boxes because satellite and cable operators have locked up the market, charging the American household an average annual rental fee of US$231.
Pay-TV operators may be forced to provide information and programming access to third parties – like tech firms Apple, Google and Tivo – who could then make devices that integrated their services and undercut the operators’ offering.
Commissioners voted 3-2 in favour of the proposal, which begins with a 60-day comment period for pay-TV providers and other stakeholders to give their input on the reforms.
LAUNCH
Virgin Galactic has unveiled the latest iteration of its suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipTwo. VSS Unity is the successor to VSS Enterprise that suffered an in-air breakup in October 2014 resulting in the death of co-pilot Michael Alsbury.
After a nine-month review, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators concluded that human error caused the crash and that a braking system was deployed too early, leading to a violent structural failure that tore the vehicle apart mid-flight.
The new version of SpaceShipTwo has a feature preventing a pilot from engaging the braking system too soon. The company has refused to be pinned down on when the vehicle will resume full-scale testing, and the start of its commercial operations remains years away.
Rocket engine startup Escape Dynamics has decided to shut down, citing the high cost of developing its microwave propulsion thruster, which proved not to be attractive to private investors.
In a statement posted on its website, the company said: “After years of research and several technology demonstrations which advanced the state-of-the-art in external propulsion, we concluded that, while microwave propulsion is feasible and is capable of efficiency and performance surpassing chemical rockets, the cost of completing the R&D all the way through operations makes the concept economically unattractive for our team at this time.”
Founded in 2010, Escape Dynamics spent five years trying to develop a reusable spaceplane. It said it shuttered its R&D on the project at the end of 2015.
North Korea has put a satellite estimated to weigh 200kg into orbit, demonstrating the progress it has made in rocket technology. The 7 February launch of Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4 was internationally condemned with countries such as the US, South Korea and Japan claiming North Korea’s launch of its Unha vehicle was just a disguise to test its long-range ballistic missile Taepodong-2, which uses similar components to Unha. The satellite was initially reported to have been tumbling in orbit but a US official later said Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4 was stable, although not transmitting.
New space ventures Spire and Rocket Lab have come together to sign a smallsat launch agreement that eschews the rideshare model and circumvents the traditional space industry, with launches planned on a “near monthly” basis from New Zealand.
Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle will launch 12 missions for Earth observation startup Spire, beginning from later this year and running throughout 2017.
It is the latest launch provider Spire has partnered with after putting its smallsats into orbit with rideshare specialist Spaceflight, Ukraine’s Dnepr, ISRO, and the ISS, which had smallsats delivered to it for deployment by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Spire said: “Our form factor and business model are such that we can launch with virtually any provider, and we have taken full advantage of that flexibility in terms of timing, cost, and deployment strategy.”
The San Francisco-based venture plans to deploy more than 20 additional smallsats in the first half of this year aboard a variety of vehicles as it looks to build out its constellation, which will collect weather and maritime tracking data. Spire added that it had not decided how many smallsats would be launched across the Rocket Lab missions.
Spire is Rocket Lab’s third customer after being contracted by NASA in July 2015 and Moon Express last October. Rocket Lab plans to begin test launches from a private space pad on the Mahia Peninsula on the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island in the coming months.
The company had planned to operate from a site on South Island, but moved to the Mahia Peninsula due to the area’s low population and minimal air and sea traffic, enabling it to launch at a more frequent rate.
The launch provider claims the site has the ability to achieve a higher launch cadence and a wider range of orbital inclinations than any other site in the world, ranging from 39 degrees through to polar and sun-synchronous orbits.
Rocket Lab has previously said its manifest is largely booked for the next few years. Rocket Lab is headquartered in the US and was founded by New Zealander Peter Beck. It has received backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, Lockheed Martin, Khosla Ventures, and K1W1.
