The annual Small Satellite Conference is a premier space conference that is devoted entirely to smallsats and among the best places to find out what’s happening in the smallsat industry. Orbital Transports will be participating in this event.

Usually held in Logan, Utah, this year’s virtual SmallSat conference will be held from August 1-6, 2020 — registration is free.

Orbital Transports is participating this year and invite all to visit the company’s virtual exhibition booth. There will be a live video chat channel where you can talk with company representatives — plus, don’t miss CEO David Hurst’s webinar on Tuesday about the firm’s new Get Spaceborne service. Details below:

Live Chat: Orbital Transports SmallSat Virtual Booth August 3-6, 2020 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM MDT

Webinar: Get Spaceborne – Flight Heritage for Your Product Tuesday, August 4, 2020 11:30 – 11:45 AM MDT

Check out the Space Catalog, Orbital Transport’s digital portal for the smallsat industry that showcases some of the industry’s most innovative and reliable companies. Featuring smallsat buses, COTS hardware components, ground station services and mission operations software, orbital transfer services, hosted payloads, and satellite servicing and refueling technologies, the Space Catalog provides a convenient go-to resource to check out the latest and greatest that the smallsat industry has to offer.

It’s no surprise anymore that work is different — at Benchmark Space Systems, the company wanted to offer an opportunity for the propulsion community to stay connected – even if that is harder working from home.

In early July, the Benchmark team produced a 2.5 hour workshop entitled “Propulsion Systems 101 Interactive Workshop – A guide to selecting the right propulsion technology for your Small Satellite mission.” In the firm’s opinion, this workshop was a great success. The company wanted to share some highlights and lessons learned for others wanting to build a learning experience for the community during COVID.

The propulsion workshop focused on providing brand-agnostic summaries of different propulsion technology as well as topics that relate to spacecraft in general – such as launch operations, mission design and financial decisions that impact the economics of a mission. While these are topics in which the firm could have easily deep dived into the technical weeds, all of the speakers focused on making their content accessible to the wider audience. This paid off greatly when it came time for the actual workshop – with more than 150 attendees, there was a huge swath of experience and backgrounds ranging from college students to industry veterans.

Working with amazing people makes the whole process infinitely more enjoyable. At Benchmark, several team members were present. Jake Teufert presented a summary of chemical propulsion systems, Isa Peterson discussed the mission level impacts that drive propulsion decisions and Chris Carella acted as the MC for the event. Other colleagues rounded out the conversation:

• Grant Bonin (Spaceflight Industries) discussed launch site considerations and advice for propulsion manufactures
• Ian Christensen (Secure World Foundation) spoke on regulatory impacts coming soon and how that might impact the propulsion and spacecraft industries
• Jason Wallace (Phase Four, Inc) discussed brand-agnostic electric propulsion systems
• Jared Bottoms (Kepler) enlightened us on the economic considerations for having a propulsion system for your spacecraft fleet

All these contributors brought sizable impact to this workshop.

The main goal of this workshop was to put together an event that every attendee in the audience would walk away from having learned something in an enjoyable way. Keeping the topics dynamic, brand agnostic and light in nature offered a safe space for the audience to learn together and ask questions without feeling like they were getting a sales pitch for three hours.

In addition to the conversation and presentations, a mega mission design tool was created. This high-level, criteria driven tool allows mission designers of all capability and program maturity to consider different propulsion systems side by side for the mission they are building. Toggles include total delta-V,mission life, de-orbiting preferences, and more. Benchmark hopes this tool enables designers the ability to quick trade options in the future.

Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) has revealed a new line of high-performance, low-cost cubesat buses — these are the 3U (“THUNDER”), 6U (“SPARTAN”) and 12U/16U (“JAEGER”) cubesats, which complement SFL’s legacy suite of space-heritage smallsats, fulfilling mission size requirements from 3 to 500 kg.

SFL will discuss its new cubesats and legacy buses at the virtual Small Satellite Conference (SmallSat 2020) that is being held online Aug. 1-6, 2020.

SFL was among the first in the world to launch cubesats that included the CanX-1 CubeSat in 2003 and CanX-2 in 2008, with capabilities that exceeded the state-of-the-art at that time. Since then, SFL has focused on somewhat larger, more capable satellites for more challenging missions, garnering a reputation for “quality at low cost.” As SFL delivered high-performance, high-quality smallsats for more than two decades, the cubesat market matured and the number of commercial opportunities increased.

The new product line of high performance CubeSats leverages SFL’s quality platform technologies while addressing the need for aggressive, disruptive missions and satellites that are as small as possible to meet highly constrained business demands. This represents a return to cubesats for SFL but with the ability to leverage more than 22 years of experience and technological advancements.

Bringing to bear the accumulated power of SFL know-how and technologies will satisfy the now mature demand for platforms that perform well and are compatible with commercial-off-the-shelf cubesat deployers and aggregated launches.

With demonstration and operational programs in mind, SFL has also announced Newspace (accelerated) and Microspace (standard) development options for the new cubesat line. The accelerated procedures are designed to move demonstration satellites quickly through the development process and into orbit for short-term proof-of-concept performance.

They can also be used operationally in scenarios where rapid replenishment is planned. Microspace, or SFL’s standard development approach, which has been perfected at SFL for more than two decades, ensures the reliability of operational spacecraft built for long-duration missions in orbit.

SFL satellites have achieved more than 121 cumulative years of operation in orbit. These microspace missions have included SFL’s trusted attitude control and, in some cases, formation-flying capabilities. Other core SFL-developed components include modular (scalable) power systems, onboard radios, flight computers, and control software.

The new SFL cubesats will be ideal for NewSpace programs that are intended to either disrupt commercial markets or operate from a long-term rapid replenishment strategy. The industry-accepted form factors of cubesats make them attractive for proof-of-concept programs or programs that involve repetitive quick replenishment where cost constraints are critical. They fit the cost models of some businesses because they are built for orbital deployment from, and aggregation of relatively inexpensive, standardized dispensers being mass produced on the market today.

SFL’s heritage of on-orbit successes includes missions related to Earth Observation (EO), atmospheric monitoring, ship tracking and communication, radio frequency signal geolocation, technology demonstration, space astronomy, solar physics, space plasma, and other scientific research.

At SmallSat 2020, SFL will present a paper on “Guidance, Navigation, and Control for Agile Small Spacecraft with Articulating Solar Arrays” during (cubesat) Workshop, Session I: Advanced Concepts I (Session Q&A Webinar, Noon to 1pm MDT, Tuesday August 4). SFL will also host live Zoom sessions to answer questions from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m., MDT, on August 3, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., MDT, on August 4-5, and 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., MDT, on August 6.

The SFL SmallSat 2020 Zoom link is
https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/96150927505

Executive Comment

“SFL can accommodate the budget and performance objectives of any microspace mission,” said SFL Director Dr. Robert E. Zee. “And we are positioned to meet the evolving spacecraft development and business model requirements of different organizations – from disruptive demonstration missions to fully operational constellations. The new line of high-performance cubesats will allow us to offer something for everyone, from market disruption to long-term operational stability. The spectrum of SFL platform offerings will enable staged roadmaps to larger missions for some customers. Having platforms that cover the full range of capability will make transitioning and forward compatibility easier for our most demanding clients.”

Zee continued, “Every satellite we build – whether CubeSat, nanosat, or microsat – incorporates the same flight heritage, avionics, and attitude control that we have developed and refined after developing 52 distinct satellites – either launched or launching soon – the Microspace Way,” said Zee. “Regardless of the demands of the mission, we use the same generic core and scale the platform as necessary to meet specific mission objectives. Once a demonstration CubeSat is launched and successfully commissioned, SFL is able to trigger mass production for rapid deployment and replenishment or leverage the success to take our client’s business model to the next step. This may involve transitioning to longer lifetime CubeSats and/or our legacy microspace platforms which can be done with relative ease.”

Hughes Network Systems, LLC (HUGHES) will participate in the consortium, led by the U.K. Government and Bharti Enterprises (“Bharti”) that will acquire OneWeb out of bankruptcy.

Hughes has agreed in principle to invest $50 million in the consortium. Additionally, Hughes will continue as a trusted technology and distribution partner to OneWeb, the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite operator which had launched 74 satellites before filing for Chapter 11 protection in March.

Consummation of the consortium is contingent upon execution and effectiveness of definitive agreements. Confirmation of OneWeb’s reorganization is contingent on certain conditions established by the Bankruptcy Court.

Through its Hughes Europe division, which is headquartered outside of London, and sister company EchoStar Mobile Limited, Hughes has worked closely with the U.K. Government. Furthermore, Hughes Communications India Ltd, (HCIL), a majority-owned subsidiary of Hughes, and Bharti Airtel Limited (“Airtel”), a leading Indian telecom provider affiliated with Bharti, are in the process of combining their satellite broadband operations in India.

The merger, which was announced in 2019, is pending regulatory approvals and is expected to bring greater scale, operational efficiencies and market reach to deliver solutions for enterprise and government networks.

Executive Comments

“We are pleased to be part of this winning team, along with the British Government and Bharti,” said Pradman Kaul, President, Hughes. “Our continuing and strengthened involvement with OneWeb extends naturally from our position as a leading geostationary satellite operator and ground network innovator, along with a meaningful partnership with Bharti and longstanding relationship with the U.K. through our business operations in both countries. This global consortium brings the right players together to fulfill the promise of the OneWeb constellation in deploying low-latency services for communities, enterprises, governments, airplanes and ships – complementing geostationary connectivity and ushering in the new era of multi-transport services that will serve growing bandwidth demand around the world. We look forward to doing our part in developing this groundbreaking technology and bringing those services to market.”

Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder and Chairman, Bharti Enterprises, added, “We are delighted to welcome Hughes to the consortium. The investment by Hughes underlines OneWeb’s exciting commercial prospects, reflected in the ongoing discussions with some of the world’s leading strategic and financial investors.”

RHEA Group and GomSpace have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to further combine their expertise on Security for Space and the development and operations of large constellations of smallsats.

The MOU consolidates a closer collaboration between the two companies as a result of past and ongoing activities in related fields. Under this MOU, the companies are partnering on security developments and monitoring operations associated with GomSpace’s present and future on-orbit satellite constellation activities, including taking advantage of RHEA’s Cyber-Range and Cyber Security Operations Centre (C-SOC).

The two companies are joining forces to address the need from customers for secure and cyber-resilient satellite constellations. The partnership will focus on security throughout the design, development and operations of the GomSpace satellite constellations.

Executive Comments

“We are delighted to be working closely with GomSpace, which is a thriving example of the new era of space companies. Its innovative approach to the development and use of SmallSat systems and subsystems is very exciting and is a perfect match to the RHEA way of working. This partnership will provide a unique offering for customers needing an end-to-end secure satellite constellation solution,” said Arne Matthyssen, RHEA Group Chief Solutions and Innovation Officer.

Niels Buus, CEO at GomSpace, added, “GomSpace and RHEA have worked together on some very interesting projects and we are delighted to consolidate the relationship through this MOU. RHEA has proven to be a front runner in Security and Cybersecurity for Space, and this alliance will enable both parties to benefit from each respective domain expertise and provide GomSpace with a unique selling proposition in the SmallSat market. There is no question that security aspects of future missions are becoming more important for our customers.”

Sateliot has sealed an agreement with the Gatehouse Group to develop the world’s first NB-IoT network, which will enable the company to offer global 5G connectivity once their LEO smallsat constellation is deployed.

This agreement with Gatehouse is part of the $4.6 million investment plan in R&D of Sateliot and is one of the three projects that the Spanish company will carry out in the next two years.

Specifically, this work will consist of adapting the NB-IoT Slack Protocol and the NB-IoT waveform so that IoT terminals can be connected to Sateliot’s LEO satellite network whenever they do not have land coverage or are deployed in areas where there is no classic mobile communication infrastructure, such as remote regions of the Arctic or the Australian outback, for example.

Within this framework, both companies will develop a ‘laboratory environment’ where they will simulate the connection using configurable hardware and test the commercial Sateliot services that are expected to start operating in the third quarter of 2022.

Sateliot’s research and work with Gatehouse will contribute to the implementation of the 5G NB-IoT international standard for small and low altitude satellite networks promoted by the 3GPP association, responsible for the 3G/4G and 5G standard, of which Sateliot is an active member. This innovative standard will also be patentable for Sateliot’s exclusive use.

Nevertheless, and according to these implementations and developments, the company will deploy from the last part of the year a constellation composed of up to 100 of these devices. With the size of a microwave, they will orbit some 500 km from the Earth, rising as telecommunications towers from space that will provide an extension of coverage to traditional operators so that they can connect objects anywhere terrestrial networks do not reach.

Executive Comments

For Michael Bondo Andersen, CEO of Gatehouse, “Considering the potential of the New Space or data as 2.7 million IOT devices are connected today through satellites, it is necessary to develop a solution that moves the NB-IOT protocols into space.”

According to Marco Guadalupi, technical director of Sateliot, “Our agreement with Gatehouse is strategic and fundamental for the implementation of our services. And a differentiating step since it will allow us to put our expertise in the main organizations of the sector of which we are members such as 3GPP, GSMA, ETSI or 5G IA“.

Sateliot will provide global and continuous connectivity to all the elements that will make up the universe of the Internet of Things (IoT) – such as the car or the house connected – under the 5G protocol. Thanks to a constellation of the latest generation of smallsats, located at low altitude that act as mobile towers, Sateliot is the perfect complement to the large telecommunications companies by providing them with the necessary infrastructure where terrestrial technologies do not reach.