Innovation, reliability, and international aspirations

Welcome to the third edition of Space Industry Insights - a fortnightly publication by?satsearch?discussing some of the trends and stories we’re observing in?the global marketplace for space.

Why freezing space is such a hot spot of innovation

By Hywel Curtis

Constraints can be good for innovation. They focus attention and resources on key problems while minimizing distractions that arise when there are too many options on the table. Proust puts it brilliantly in Swann's Way;

“...as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.”

Restrictions in space are some of the most tyrannical imaginable. But they have given way to some outstanding and creative innovation that is pushing the boundaries of technology and engineering.

Understanding and addressing the limitations, as opportunities for creative solutions rather than intractable restrictions on success, can lead to huge advancements in the state-of-the-art. Here are some of the main areas where they arise:

The SWaP-C budget

You can only use what you can afford, integrate, and power in space. The SWaP-C budget encompasses all these constraints, though it is important to note that it is typically applied at the overall ‘system of systems’ level, and not for individual components.

Compliance and exports

Limitations might be dictated by your geographical location (e.g. desired hardware subject to ITAR rules) and/or by regulations that apply in your country. This might mean using alternative suppliers or re-factoring aspects of a mission to meet national guidelines.

The plain old physics of the thing

In Earth Observation (EO) the aperture size is a fundamental limit on new technologies – there’s no getting around it. Such physics-related limitations are difficult to account for, but can be dealt with in innovative ways.

What you can actually launch

You need to be able to fit your technology into one of the existing launch options on the market. This comes down to price, availability, mass, technical compatibility, orbital choices, and other such factors. While this decision likely comes a little later in mission planning, any restraints that it imposes might require creative adaptation.

Offer a professional level of service

Ultimately, where business is concerned, clients in the space industry are expecting higher levels of service, performance, reliability, and efficiency every year.

Mature NewSpace companies are evolving business models to meet changing demands and the quality, quantity, and availability of space data is improving, which is increasing competition.

These pressures are forcing suppliers to innovate and develop, creating new product lines or service concepts that meet industry needs.

So I’d argue that in many cases space companies aren’t developing ground-breaking new innovations in spite of the stringent demands of the operating environment, but precisely because of it.

What will reliability mean in ProSpace?

By Sindhu P.

During a recent discussion with a supplier of sun sensors, an interesting question emerged about where the industry is heading in terms of reliability. As some suppliers pivot parts of their business model in line with the ProSpace concept, it is worth discussing what the expected reliability standards may be.

ProSpace is an emerging middle ground between traditional space and newspace. The traditional space industry has always placed great importance on high reliability and longer operating lifetimes, while the NewSpace industry focuses more on lower costs and higher agility.

This agility has provided NewSpace suppliers with an opportunity to experiment with production volumes and repeatability. These two variables are key for statistical improvements to processes.

But at the same time, the stringent qualification, verification, and testing processes of traditional space can be retained to some extent in order to standardize reliability. A combination of these two approaches could provide a sweet spot where ProSpace products can fit in.

Space/military-graded components are costly, often have longer lead times, and may also sometimes require custom fabrication. However, such high-reliability components have the advantage of not requiring elaborate aftermarket qualification testing and are typically provided with ‘guaranteed’ reliability through the design/manufacturing/process.?

For example, MIL-217, released in 1995, is a widely used reliability prediction handbook for many electronic components in traditional space. This guide has been extensively used in failure rate predictions but is widely agreed to be a little too conservative in some areas.

With the reduced reliability and lifetime requirements of missions in recent years, readily available Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components have instead been widely adopted through commercial upscreening.

The use of COTS components mainly increases component availability to meet performance. However, this approach does not build reliability into the component, but rather mitigates the risk. Many companies also offer upscreening and qualification as a service, such as Force Technologies, and Micross.

Policies on the use of components have also been extended from space/military grade electronics to COTS alternatives, with some tailoring. ESA ECSS-Q-ST-60-13C is one such example.?

Ultimately, with increased use of new custom technologies, such as ASICs, and the growth of the use of COTS products, it is getting difficult to standardize reliability predictions.

What do you think? Please feel free to share your thoughts on how we can establish standards for reliability prediction and calculation to advance the commercialization of space.

The international opportunities for India’s space industry

By Kartik Kumar

There are a lot of developments at the moment in the Indian space sector and some of the most prominent are in the satellite communications industry. Specifically, given the fact that there are around 740 million Indian citizens who don't have regular access to consistent, stable, high-speed internet, there is a push to try to connect rural communities. Satellites can offer an opportunity to achieve this across the entire country.

Given the size of the market, there is quite an important turf war going on at the moment. A number of foreign enterprises are looking to work with local companies to deliver great connectivity across the country to meet the demand. But this poses a number of commercial and regulatory challenges.

The Indian government has been working its way through the framework within which commercial entities can serve citizens, while at the same time protecting and preserving fundamental national security aspects.

This has been in the works for quite a while and a lot of the regulations that have been drafted have yet to be finalized. Nevertheless, it's interesting to see that space companies are popping up in India with funding from prominent and renowned investors, with a view towards taking advantage of the push to open up and liberalize the market.

India is also an important player in the subcontinent, and whatever happens within the Indian space sector is likely to have ripple effects on neighboring countries.

We're already seeing quite a lot of deal-making happening within the satsearch marketplace between Indian companies and those that are in South-East Asia. Specifically, countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines are building space capacity and capabilities. India is primed to serve this market, given the rich pedigree and heritage of the supply base that has served such countries’ needs over decades.

One of the important challenges to overcome in this regard is for Indian space companies to look towards productizing. Traditionally, many of them have focussed on serving the needs of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and mainly through excellence in manufacturing, assembly, integration, qualification, and testing.

However, for Indian companies to really take the world by storm, it's important that they start thinking about scaling defensible products commercially. In the next edition of Space Industry Insights I’ll discuss how companies can make this a reality.

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