Maxar Technologies is about to deliver in early 2024 the primary of 16 satellite buses ordered by L3Harris for a military constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) run by the U.S. Space Development Agency.
L3Harris is the primary customer for Maxar’s newly designed small satellite bus, tailored for the megaconstellation market. The bus is now offered to other defense contractors competing for SDA satellite contracts.
Maxar President and CEO Daniel Jablonsky said the corporate is attempting to seize an important opportunity created by SDA’s large LEO constellation — which incorporates a Transport Layer of satellite for communications and a Tracking Layer for missile detection.
The satellite bus chosen by L3Harris for SDA’s Tracking Layer is the smallest of the Maxar line, designed for proliferated constellations that require faster production rates.
“We’re pretty nascent on the defense side right away, but we’re coming up the chain fast,” Jablonsky told April 20.
L3Harris in July won a $700 million contract from SDA to provide 14 satellites for the Tracking Layer Tranche 1, plus two additional satellites for a missile-tracking demonstration. All 16 satellites are projected to launch in mid-2025.
“It’s a growing market opportunity for us,” said Jablonsky. “Budgets for defense applications are going up around the globe. And so they’re particularly going up for robust space capabilities.”
The contract with L3Harris marks a significant milestone for Maxar. Only five years ago, the corporate was exploring options to sell and even shut down its business spacecraft manufacturing business resulting from dwindling orders for geostationary communications satellites. As a substitute, Maxar restructured its business to give attention to smaller satellites and government sales.
PURSUING DEFENSE INDUSTRY PARTNERS
Maxar, in 2021, unsuccessfully bid for an SDA satellite contract as a chief contractor and filed a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office. The protest led SDA to alter its contracting approach from traditional procurements to a more flexible contracting mechanism generally known as Other Transaction Authority, which requires large defense contractors to team up with business players.
Within the two years since, Maxar shifted its focus to hardware manufacturing and has sought teaming arrangements with prime contractors.
“We’re very pleased with the partnership we’ve with L3Harris,” said Jablonsky. Maxar can also be in discussions with other defense firms. “We’re a business company, and we’re very glad to work with the primes.”
For the reason that rollout of the LEO bus platform, he said, “persons are excited concerning the capability, and we’re getting inbound requests for proposals.”
TWO BUSES PER MONTH
Joe Foust, Maxar’s vice chairman of proliferated low Earth orbit constellations, told the corporate spent the past two years developing the small satellite bus for the LEO market in hopes of competing more aggressively within the business and national security sectors.
The buses, made at Maxar’s satellite factory in Palo Alto, California, will probably be shipped to L3Harris’ assembly facility at Palm Bay, Florida.
After the primary delivery in early 2024, Maxar will start producing buses at a rate of roughly two monthly, Foust said.
Foust said Maxar’s small bus is being offered within the business LEO market primarily for communications constellations.
“The 250-1,000 kilogram bus can support payloads anywhere from 200 to about 500 kilograms,” he said.
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Supply chain problems, some brought on by the COVID pandemic, slowed down Maxar’s satellite deliveries over the past two years, Foust noted, but now the corporate is working to forestall such delays going forward.
As soon because the contract with L3Harris was signed in August, “we were ready to put those orders pretty quickly,” said Foust. “So we got all our long-lead items on contract inside a month or two.”
Maxar plans to extensively test the brand new bus in its lab before the primary one is shipped to L3Harris, said Foust. “We’ll undergo a really rigorous test campaign to ensure it really works as an area vehicle.”
Due to its modular design with standard components, he said, production can scale up pretty rapidly.
LEGION BUS FOR REMOTE-SENSING CONSTELLATIONS
The plan to diversify Maxar’s satellite business includes its mid-size bus, originally designed for its WorldView Legion high-resolution Earth imaging constellation.
Jablonsky said the corporate rebranded its buses into three lines. The smaller bus it sold to L3Harris is the Maxar 300 series. The WorldView Legion bus is the Maxar 500, and the massive buses used for geostationary communications satellites are the Maxar 1300 line.
A smaller version of the 1300 bus was chosen in 2018 by Swedish broadband operator Ovzon. Maxar is now actively marketing the five hundred bus used on WorldView Legion for remote-sensing applications. Jablonsky said the platform is best suited to hold a sensor package for electro-optical or radar imaging. “A number of other things may be placed on that bus.”
GEO SATELLITES NOT GOING AWAY
On the geostationary satellite front, there are still hopeful signs for Maxar, regardless that the market has lost ground to LEO constellations.
A U.S. Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction helped Maxar secure an order from Intelsat in 2020 for 4 GEO satellites. Intelsat and other operators should clear the C-band spectrum for cellular 5G networks to qualify for billions of dollars in FCC incentive payments.
While the C-band auction created a synthetic bump out there, other orders have been placed by satellite broadcasters.
SiriusXM last yr bought two GEO satellites from Maxar to expand its radio broadcasting constellation. And last month the Dish Network placed a GEO bus order to expand its broadcast services over North America.
“The GEO customers that we’ve proceed to have business cases,” said Jablonsky. “There are specific things which might be very efficiently done from GEO, and broadcasting I don’t think goes anywhere, anytime soon.”
The 1300 series platform, he noted, is being applied to other uses besides geostationary satellites. An example is NASA’s Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), a spacecraft designed to supply electrical power for future elements of the agency’s lunar Gateway outpost in deep space. The launch of the Gateway mission is currently targeted for 2024.
“There’s all these ecosystems on the civil side that I feel are very interesting,” Jablonsky said.