ProSpace - an emerging middle ground between traditional space and NewSpace

While the space community is still thrilled with the developments brought by NewSpace companies across many countries, experts in the industry are also observing another evolving dynamic in the industry.

There is a new area of the market developing in which suppliers from both NewSpace and traditional space are offering higher capabilities to customers who want high-performance payloads and services.

We’re tentatively calling this ProSpace and in this article, we sketch out what it is and where it sits in the wider space ecosystem.

Understanding traditional space and NewSpace?

Historically, space missions were mostly led by government demand, funded by taxpayers, then contracted out to industry (in whole or in part) to develop the technology.

Examples of these include the rich heritage of NASA, ESA, and other agency missions developed by industry stakeholders in their respective regions. For example, you can view contract details of some of NASA’s engagements with industry players from 1978-1980 at this link.

These missions will continue as space agencies and defense institutions are always looking to push the boundaries of technological possibilities and will seek to extract the highest performance and reliability possible to establish a certain sovereign capability for their country.

Given the large-scale taxpayer capital involved, such stakeholders have very little appetite for risk. The cost of equipment onboard such missions has often therefore escalated due to the underlying incentives. This has major impacts on the downstream supply chain and the vendor network at various levels who are forced to align with these goals and procedures.

The concept of NewSpace emerged in the space industry to exploit this opportunity and aims to build B2B and B2C services by lowering the cost of access to space.?

As private capital has become increasingly interested in this area, the incentive to create products/services, and the risk appetites associated with them, are very different from those that suppliers in traditional space missions have faced.?

The early days of the CubeSat industry are a good example of this dynamic - with teams trying to create low-cost platforms through experiments with Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) hardware.

However, for several years a significant number of these missions have faced a range of different failures. In fact, some of the public evidence collected so far indicates that up to a third of missions suffer failures: “The number of small satellite missions that ended in failure or partial failure was approximately 35% averaged over years 2000 to 2016.” From Small-Satellite Mission Failure Rates by Stephen Jacklin of NASA Ames Research Center (source PDF).

We can of course put this down to the learning processes for bringing new innovation to market, particularly in the harsh environment of space. And it is just such lessons that have led to NewSpace companies to improve performance and reliability of their commercial offers; progress that can be seen quite clearly at the platform level.

Recent trends in satellite platforms

There are a number of interesting converging trends that we are seeing in the industry today which we believe are leading to the creation of a niche that sits between traditional space and NewSpace. These are the result of a variety of interesting new mission types and include:

1. Higher performance CubeSats - more and more CubeSat payloads are driving the need for higher power, bandwidth, and data from platform developers. These are leading to innovations in areas such as deployable solar arrays, higher bandwidth communication, on-board data processing systems, and several other ongoing technological advances that are adding greater power and capabilities in the same form factor.
2. Mass manufacturing of microsatellite platforms (up to 250 kg) for constellations - There are around a dozen satellite factories (with a few more likely in development) which have emerged around the world with the intention of supporting constellations that can accommodate payloads which are too big for CubeSats and need bigger platforms. These include Earth Observation (EO) missions that are looking for higher spatial/spectral resolution or systems exploring new bands such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR).
3. Innovation in larger satellites (250-1,200kg) - As broadband and other communication applications are maturing, bigger satellites featuring new technologies are growing in popularity. A good example is the increased interest in software-defined platforms for the adoption of new payloads.?

All three types of platforms are also finding some interesting use cases in different orbits such as:?

1. Cubesats and microsatellites flying to Geostationary Orbit (GEO) to exploit the higher orbits while still using a smaller platform (Astranis for example),
2. Large, mass-produced satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for higher bandwidth applications (e.g. SpaceX’s Gen2 satellites are 22 feet long and weigh 2,755 pounds, and are now orbiting 340 miles above the Earth's surface), and
3. Mini satellites in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) with data relay (e.g. ReOrbit)

ProSpace - between traditional space and NewSpace

Based on these significant trends, we see ProSpace, a new niche between traditional space and NewSpace emerging today. The requirements for a supplier to exploit opportunities to capitalize on this trend will include being able to provide high performance with high reliability, with the following features:

1. Higher than the typical historical performance that CubeSats have been able to provide over the last few years, in terms of power, processing, communication, and similar technical parameters,
2. Higher reliability, on the basis of standards less stringent than typical space agency requirements, but that are still able to ensure the levels needed to operate a consistent service for a significant number of years, and
3. At costs that are not as high as traditional public-funded space missions but that are not so low as to prevent the development of a sustainable, high-quality service - unlike the generation of low-cost commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) CubeSat missions.

ProSpace provides an opportunity for both traditional space and NewSpace players to innovate and compete.

Traditional space companies are exploiting the opportunity with the knowledge and infrastructure they have to tailor their products to meet these requirements.

Several NewSpace players are upgrading the capabilities of their components and platforms to match the expectations of buyers who expect higher performance and reliability.

We think it will be very interesting to see how the commercial offers in this area develop - but do you agree with our assessment of these trends or do you see the industry following a different path?

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