LAS VEGAS – The Space Development Agency is preparing to award contracts to companies focused on satellite servicing.
Through the contracts, SDA, which is part of the U.S. Space Force, will not hire companies to conduct demonstration or to deorbit satellites. Instead, the agency will pay companies to share technical designs and business-case analysis.
SDA leaders want to know whether there will soon be a commercial market for these services. If so, the agency wants to figure out how to work with the servicing companies.
“I think there’s a business case there,” SDA Director Derek Tournear said Aug. 1 at the AIAA ASCEND conference here. “If I have to make sure that all my satellites at [an altitude of] 1,000 kilometers have redundancy on the propulsion systems and flight controls to ensure they deorbit within 25 years, that’s a cost to the satellites.”
Instead, Tournear would prefer to accept that a certain fraction of SDA satellites will not deorbit on time without help.
“I’ll save that cost on the engineering of those satellites” and then “hire someone to go in and tug my satellites out,” Tournear said.
Deorbit Rules
Longstanding international guidelines called for deorbiting satellites within 25 years of the end of their mission. Those guidelines are being reconsidered by a U.S.government task force as well as by international government agencies.
In the United States, a question being considered is “should we treat someone that’s flying one, two or even 100 satellites, the same as someone that’s flying 10,000 satellites,” Tournear said.
Whether or not U.S. policy changes, SDA is likely to be an important customer for what Tournear calls “active orbital maintenance.”
Contracts Coming
In March, SDA solicited proposals for engineering studies, analyses and technical information on “assisted, on-demand space vehicle de-orbit as a service for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.” Proposals were due in late May.
“Imminently, we’re going to award a few contracts for companies that are planning a business case based on commercial providers for orbital maintenance,” Tournear said. SDA wants to “encourage that market and eventually become a main customer in that market for commercial orbital maintenance, so that you can deorbit on demand and not have to worry so much about debris collecting just due to dead satellites.”
Each SDA missile-tracking satellite costs about $44 million. The price tag for Transport Layer communications satellites is roughly $14 million.
“That’s what we’re prepared to spend,” Tournear said. “As the technology matures, we’ll increase the capability and keep the price constant over time. What that means is any dollar that I don’t have to spend to over-engineer or provide redundancy on my propulsion and deorbit systems is funding that can be put back into the capabilities of the payload. That’s the cost trade that we’re looking at.”
