A smallsat thruster shortage – how we got here
Supply chain fragility has been a perpetual challenge for the satellite industry, often centering on subsystems and components for which there are very few suppliers. This fragility was on full display during the Covid-19 crisis (e.g., two-year satellite manufacturing delays), but flare-ups continue to surface four years after the crisis peaked. In the case of satellite propulsion, the supplier landscape was the opposite. Quilty Space counts more than 100 different thruster systems marketed over the past five years by more than 80 companies, ranging from international defense primes to small-town shops, to the Cambrian explosion of venture-funded startups that emerged in the mid-2010s.
Despite the market’s apparent oversupply, however, the Space Development Agency (SDA), Payload reports, could encounter delays with its PWSA constellation of several hundred satellites due to the slow delivery of propulsion units. What went wrong? As it turns out, electric propulsion (EP) thrusters, especially the Hall-Effect thrusters pLEO operators fancy, are extremely hard to manufacture at scale. Russia-based EDB Fakel was historically the industry’s largest producer of EP thrusters (by an order of magnitude) but has been barred from Western supply chains since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Fakel’s exit from the market prompted OneWeb to source its thrusters from its backup supplier, Massachusetts-based Busek, which is now the only U.S. company to have built more than 100 Hall-Effect thrusters. Meanwhile, dozens of EP vendors have been unable to fill the gap. In the past two years alone, at least four EP vendors have experienced in-orbit anomalies, including Bradford, Enpulsion, Qinetiq, and Phase Four. And while a handful of U.S. companies have developed Hall-Effect thrusters of their own (or licensed the IP), all but Busek are still attempting to scale production nearly a decade later.
What are SDA’s options for maintaining its targeted two-year cadence of satellite launches? Possibilities include:
· Tapping into vertically integrated constellation operators like SpaceX or Amazon
· Invest in promising EP vendors to help them scale
· Switch to alternative propulsion technologies such as gridded ion or electrospray
· Working with suppliers in allied countries
It’s an overstated adage, but space is hard, and when that difficulty is buried in the supply chain it can introduce setbacks for multi-billion-dollar programs. While everyone is focused on the high-profile launch battles, there won’t be many satellites to launch if no one can build propulsion units at scale.
SOURCE: https://payloadspace.com/there-arent-enough-satellite-thrusters-for-the-sda-yet/