Government Looks To Overcome Challenges To Deploying Commercial Hosted Payloads

NASA has a healthy budget and targeted policy that supports the use of commercial hosted payloads for space missions, said Lori Garver, deputy administrator. “There is policy stability for this arena.” A NASA goal is to advance the commercial industry, utilizing it to the greatest extent possible, she said. The policy has been in place “from the very beginning to do creative initiatives like this for the purposes of helping to advance the competitive U.S. industry,” Garver said. The 2010 National Space Policy states NASA should “explore the use of inventive, non-traditional arrangements for acquiring commercial space goods and services to meet U.S. government requirements,” including hosted government capabilities and commercial spacecraft, she said. The government should do easier hosted payloads first and then get more creative, Garver said. Hosted payloads “aren’t for all purposes at all times,” she said. Satellites aren’t going to go away as a result of hosted payloads, she added.

A study released this year by Euroconsult showed that deals around hosted payloads continue to get done slowly, said Nathan de Ruiter, Euroconsult senior consultant. There have been about 50 hosted payload launches since the early 1990s, but only 10 payloads are under contract and scheduled to be launched before 2015, he said. Despite discussions about hosted payloads, the rate of two to three hosted payload missions per year has continued over the past several years, he said. “We've not seen so many real contract signing.” The findings show there are benefits to hosted payloads, but there also are hurdles, he said. The challenges are likely the reason why there hasn’t been a real take up of hosted payloads, de Ruiter said. The U.S. process is very complex, he said. Operators struggle with scheduling challenges, how to handle failures and how to handle satellite relocation, he said. U.S. operators highlighted International Traffic in Arms Regulations as a hindering factor, he added.

There’s a big desire by operators to host payloads, and there are government customers willing to have payloads hosted, said Patrick Campbell, an attorney at Paul, Weiss who has represented satellite operators. However, “we have not seen a lot of these deals occur,” he said. “If your goal is to put an antenna on a building, you don’t need to build a building.” The government is “building buildings in order to host antennae that could be hosted on existing commercial payloads,” he said. There are many sorts of payloads and technologies that the government could be putting on commercial spacecraft, but “it’s just not happening,” he said.

The industry also deals with challenges, like difficult rules and timing problems, Campbell said. There has to be “some way of changing the way we look at these payloads” and find a way to get the government to be more like a commercial actor, he added.

The government is at “the tip of some key people realizing that it is in our best interest to do it,” Garver said. “Not all of NASA science can be done from areas that are likely to be served by commercial satellites,” she said. “There are going to be sweet spots for hosted payloads and we're focusing on those.” Garver said that with a $17.7 billion annual budget, NASA can work through the current budget issues. For the government, hosting isn’t new, said Doug Holker, associate principal director of developmental planning and projects at Aerospace Corp. But hosting on a commercial system is relatively new, he said. “It’s a paradigm shift for the government to do that.” There will be a lot more acceptance of hosted payloads “as we show” what can be accomplished as deployment takes place, he said.