GEO Satellite Manufacturing Death Spiral?

If the GEO satcom industry is to survive, GEO satellite manufacturers will need to up their game and reverse a troubling trend of ever-longer time to bring new GEO capacity online. Starlink progressed through four generations of satellites in the time it took Viasat to bring its first ViaSat-3 online (8.5 years). 

Prior to the adoption of high-throughput satellite (HTS) technology, the standard build time for a GEO satcom satellite was three years, and post-launch, a satellite could be brought into operation in as little as two weeks.

As communications satellites have grown increasingly complex, however, manufacturing build times have grown by at least two years. Meanwhile, the time to calibrate and bring satellites into service is also growing. Viasat’s announcement that ViaSat-3 is now operational 15 months after launch is an extreme example (exacerbated by an antenna failure), but the trend has been steadily up and to the right over the past decade, growing by about half a year even when factoring in electric orbit raising. 

A Quilty Space survey of the highest capacity GEO satellites launched in recent years shows that ViaSat-3 F1 is now the second Very High-Throughput Satellite (VHTS) stuck in calibration limbo for more than a year, following Eutelsat’s Konnect VHTS, which took ~14 months from launch to service.

Not every VHTS satellite is experiencing the same challenges. EchoStar’s Jupiter-3 went from launch to service in about five months, and SES activated the SES-17 satellite’s service in eight months. These, too, were novel satellite designs, but the two satellites averaged 5.5 years from order to service start.

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t particularly encouraging. With Boeing in shambles, Maxar owned by private equity, and Lockheed safely in its DoD shell, Northrop looks like the one-eyed giant in the land of the blind. But do they want to take a hard swing at the commercial GEO satcom market? 

The prospects over the pond are not much better. Both Airbus and Thales Alenia Space are struggling with new software-defined satellite programs that are two to four years behind schedule and a financial disaster for both companies. Rumors of merger talks are probably not wrong.

Perhaps the future lies elsewhere? That would be the thesis behind a new generation of GEO competitors, ranging from small GEOs (Swissto12) to monster GEOs that can only launch on Starship (K2 Space). All bets are on.

SOURCE: https://news.viasat.com/newsroom/viasat-3-f1-satellite-enters-commercial-service