Main Engine Cut Off - T+151: Northrop Grumman, Satellite Servicing, and DARPA’s RSGS

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

After a tumultuous past few years, DARPA has selected a new partner for RSGS. It is none other than Northrop Grumman, who has found early success with their satellite servicing ventures.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous—and 349 other supporters.TopicsMEV-1 Docks with Intelsat 901 - Main Engine Cut OffMaxar/SSL Cancels DARPA RSGS Satellite Servicing Agreement - Main Engine Cut OffDARPA picks Northrop Grumman as its commercial partner for satellite servicing program - SpaceNews.comNorthrop Grumman’s Wholly Owned Subsidiary, SpaceLogistics, Selected by DARPA as Commercial Partner for Robotic Servicing Mission | Northrop GrummanNorthrop Grumman Successfully Completes Historic First Docking of Mission Extension Vehicle with Intelsat 901 Satellite | Northrop GrummanEpisode T+93: NASA Goddard and Restore-L - Main Engine Cut OffThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. I want to talk today about a DARPA program that has been quite the saga over the years. This is the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites Program, RSGS for short. This has had a tumultuous past few years. So to roll the clock back and give you the full context, this is a program that was designed to, obviously by its name, demonstrate robotic servicing on satellites, specifically targeting geosynchronous here, but it was maybe a little more expansive than that in general. So the basics of it was that DARPA was looking for a partner to build the spacecraft bus, which would host a payload developed by DARPA, and I believe it was the U.S. Naval Laboratory that were working on the robotics platforms itself. It would be two different robotic arms,

a couple of tools at the end of each, and ideally, I think the mission was to change out, I don't know, different parts on the satellite, whether it was solar panels or batteries. I'm not sure they ever determined exactly what they'd be changing out, but it was a demonstration mission that could accomplish a series of tasks. And they were going to host it on a commercial payload, a commercial provided bus, I should say, not a payload. And the agency itself would provide the launch and the robotics payload, and then the satellite operator would host them on their

satellite bus. They would get them to where they need to be, carry out the mission successfully. And then, and this was the critical part, after the DARPA demonstration was done, the satellite would be turned over to that satellite producer to be commercialized from there. So they could offer satellite servicing partnerships or services, I guess would be not really partnerships, to other satellites in the area. That turned out to be a point of contention and led to a lawsuit. So DARPA awarded this contract to SSL, Space Systems Loral. They are a division of Maxar Technologies now. Sorry for all the names here, just trying to get you up to speed on how all this worked. So SSL won that initial contract to host

the RSGS payload. Northrop Grumman, who at the time was Orbital ATK, now they're Northrop Grumman, they sued over this award because they said that DARPA was funding another company in something that is redundant to what they were already working on. And there was some clause in the law that said the government should not directly compete with commercial entities that are trying to do the same thing. So they sued over that, saying that the turning of this satellite from a DARPA demonstration into a commercially available option was directly competing with what they were working on. At the time, it was mission extension vehicles and mission robotic vehicles. That lawsuit eventually got thrown out. There was basically the trio of things that were being argued over was Northrop Grumman's mission extension vehicles, DARPA and

SSL's RSGS program, and then there is another program at NASA called Restore-L. If you remember, about two years ago, I went down to NASA Goddard and talked with the team working on Restore-L. That is a program that NASA's working on to refuel a Landsat satellite. So this was the kind of landscape that everyone was arguing about being redundant and competing with commercial partners and look at NASA's already doing this kind of thing. Eventually, that all got tossed out and SSL was pushing on with the program with DARPA. Northrop Grumman continued work on their mission extension vehicle. Flash forward a couple of years, that was in the late 2017 timeframe. Early 2019, SSL cancelled their agreement with DARPA, because at the time, Maxar was going through hell, to put it all honestly. They had a DigitalGlobe satellite, Worldview 4, that failed just after launching and was a huge insurance hit. It was like, you know,

hundreds of millions of dollars that they lost from Worldview 4 dying so early on orbit. They also had, at the time, the geostationary satellite market was really down. There weren't a lot of orders, so they had a bunch of layoffs. They were selling properties. They were kind of in a tailspin for a little bit of time. Their stock price was going, I think it dropped to zero off the end of their stock price. They were having a hell of a time. So in early 2019, they canceled this contract, and they said that they were not able to find an economically viable path to support RSGS within the time frame that they needed considering their financial situation. And because this was a public-private partnership in that way of hosting a DARPA payload and eventually becoming a commercial platform,

this was couched in a public-private partnership in which the company was supposed to be able to find a commercial offering for the satellite after it. That was part of the deal, that DARPA would be providing some funding, they would provide a launch, but that the company would be investing heavily in this as well because of that eventual payoff. But for Maxar, you know, they were looking at a short-term problem, and this was a long-term payoff. It was going to be another two or three years before this got up on orbit, did its demonstration, and then would be able to start making money for them. And at the time, that just wasn't going to work, so they terminated the agreement. From there, we followed two different tracks for this saga. DARPA then had

to go through the political ramifications of that and figure out if they were going to have money to re-award this program to some other provider, figure out if that was even in the cards for them, figure out if they can get the additional money needed through the acquisitions process. And Northrop Grumman all along was continuing to work on their mission extension vehicles. Obviously, we know now that the mission extension vehicles have worked out. Just a couple of weeks back, mission extension vehicle 1 docked with Intelsat 901. If you have not seen the photos from this, you've got to check them out. They are pretty spectacular. Black and white, but you've got this view of Intelsat 901 with the whole earth in the background, and it's just beautiful. Beautiful imagery coming from this. But they successfully docked with

Intelsat-901. They had quite a campaign of, you know, rendezvousing with this, coming in a couple of different times, eventually did dock with Intelsat-901. And they are now, they have taken over, you know, the propulsion and pointing services on that satellite. So that is the scope of mission extension vehicle, as its name implies, it extends the mission of that satellite. So that is the scope of mission extension vehicle, as its name implies, it extends the mission of a satellite. It does so by taking over propulsion, attitude control, everything that is essentially needed except for the payloads on the satellite itself that are transmitting, you know, broadcasting back down to Earth or whatever their job is. It's taking over all of the other stuff. Maybe the satellite has

run out of fuel. Maybe it has some other issue that it can't maintain its pointing on its own, and this takes over for it. So at this point, MEV-1 is going to complete a five-year mission with Intelsat-901. That is the initial contract for this mission extension vehicle. It's bringing it down from its graveyard orbit that is 300 kilometers above geostationary orbit. It'll bring it back down into geostationary orbit and begin services once again. After that five years is up, the mission extension vehicle should have about 10 years of lifespan left so it can go off and service other satellites in geostationary orbit. And that's the

business model here. You're letting somebody extend their useful time of that payload on orbit for a couple of years without paying for a huge launch. So without a massive investment, you're extending the life of that huge asset that you already have up in space. And eventually, over that 15-year lifespan of a mission extension vehicle, Northrop Grumman expects to make significant profit. They can launch a lot of these mission extension vehicles as secondary payloads heading up to geostationary transfer orbit. Then they can get to geostationary orbit and do this 15 years of service and make a good amount of money. If you run the numbers, it does turn out to be, you know,

millions of dollars of profit if you obviously don't know the exact prices of everything that's involved here. But it's not hard to really do some math to show that this does make some millions of dollars over that lifespan. Now from here, Mission Extension Vehicle 2 is already on its way. It's not launched yet, but it's on its way to launch. Intelsat, again, has an agreement to be the first customer of Mission Extension Vehicle 2. So this Mission Extension Vehicle line seems to be quite lucrative for Northrop Grumman, and they do have plans to push beyond Simple Life Extension to something called the Mission Robotic Vehicle. And that is the kind of second component of this satellite servicing market for Northrop Grumman. The difference here

is that the mission robotic vehicle will be launched. It has a couple of robotic arms. And what it also has on board is something they called mission extension pods. So instead of a full second satellite that goes on and attaches typically to the engine of these geostationary satellites, these would be much smaller pods that the robotic vehicle would go up and attach to the satellite itself. The most recent visualization I've seen shows it attaching to the engine the same way this mission extension vehicle does, where it clamps on to the engine on the back of the satellite. And these pods are much smaller. So the idea is one robotic vehicle can carry many different pods

that would go up. They would provide, I would assume, much shorter service lifespans for these vehicles, just because it can't fit as much fuel inside. But if each pod can offer three to five years of extension services, and each robotic vehicle can carry at least three, probably up to five or six pods on a mission, you can see that you are able to offer a lot more mission extension services to a lot more satellites in a much shorter time span. So instead of banking on five or ten years of timeline before you're turning profit with a mission extension vehicle, that could be done and crunched into five years with just as much, just as many agreements signed with these different satellites. So Northrop Grumman seems like they are really going in on this mission extension services idea as a lucrative business

model. And I like the idea of mission extension pods because specifically because of that timeline crunch, who knows where the industry is going to be at 5, 10, 15 years from now, especially considering things that are going to come online, new launch vehicles, reusable upper stages, hopefully space tugs, you name it, there's going to be a lot of shifts in the industry. So if you're able to identify mission extension services as a valuable business for the current aging generation of satellites in geostationary orbit, mission extension pods can let you offer those services to as many as possible in the next five to 10 years and really focus that revenue generation on a need that is present right now. And then you're building up all this experience of these different vehicles, different robotic operations.

You're pushing it every single time you're launching. When you get five or 10 years out and things have significantly changed, hopefully you've got enough of a base built up of customers and experience and technology that you can respond to where the market is at that time. So that's what Northrop Grumman was doing, and that's kind of where they stand at this point. As we get to this point in 2020, and DARPA has officially re-awarded RSGS to Northrop Grumman. So they've kind of had these two tracks, right? DARPA figured out that they're going to be able to re-award this program. Northrop Grumman has been pushing forward on

mission extension vehicles, mission robotic vehicles. And now we get to the point when DARPA chooses Northrop Grumman for the re-award of RSGS. So I want to talk a little bit about what we could see given all of that context that's in place and where this program might be going, whether this is a good or a bad thing. Before we do that, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff. Head over to mainenginecutoff.com support if you want to help like so many are doing right now. We've got 387 of you supporting the show every single month. I could not be more thankful for your support. It really keeps this thing going and And hopefully, we're going to be able to travel to some events this year. We'll see how everything turns out with the pandemic here. But I'm hoping to get down to DM2 if that is possible, hoping to do a couple other things as well this year. But we'll see how that all pans out. But

I couldn't do any of that without your support. And this episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 38 executive producers. Brandon, Matthew, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, TheEverDashNaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for producing this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. So to cut right on the chase on RSGS and Northrop Grumman's mission extension vehicles, I think this is a great thing that's going to work out really well

for both partners here. In the case of DARPA, they previously with SSL were going to have to work with SSL to really work out a lot of complexities with the mission that aren't going to come into focus here with Northrop Grumman, right? DARPA was handling the robotic payload, but they were also going to have to work out with SSL everything that was needed for navigation and guidance, proximity operations, docking, rendezvous with the satellite that would be targeted, maybe imaging. There's a lot that was going to go into this mission that isn't the robotic payload. That stuff has already been worked out by Northrop Grumman. Not only has it been worked out, it's been proven at this point. So they've done a full mission extension vehicle approach and docking, and now they're, you know, pulling that satellite to its new operational spot. So they have proved out in orbit a lot of those things, if not all of those things, that would be needed for, you know, when RSGS does get up on orbit and is approaching

that first satellite. Not only have they done it once, they've got another on the books for just a few months from now. I haven't seen the official launch date given everything that's going on, but Mission Extension Vehicle 2 is slated to go up pretty soon. And they obviously have a lot of work underway for mission robotic vehicles. So they have worked out all of those different complexities that really make this new RSGS 2.0, if you will, it can focus that even more on the robotic payload. DARPA doesn't have to worry about all of those complexities of the mission. They can focus on the robotic payload. Northrop Grumman has this wealth of information on their first couple of missions already,

so they can share that with DARPA and say, here's what we can do. Here's the kind of accuracy we can provide on guidance. Here's what we can provide you live when you're working on this mission. There's so much that Northrop Grumman can bring to the table here. And then beyond that, for Northrop Grumman's side, this is really the first sale of a mission robotic vehicle. They're going to be able to already get that line up and running because they know they have a customer in DARPA here for mission robotic vehicles. So that propels their service forward in that way and gives them a customer for that first mission robotic vehicle. They can start saying to people like Intelsat, who they're already selling services to, hey, we're going to be flying this really cool mission

with DARPA. We think we can offer this, that, and this to you after that demonstration is complete. It's going to be a few years, but they can start building that customer base for the more advanced servicing. Maybe they've got some mission extension pods. They can fly on the satellite that will be hosting RSGS. Maybe they can start selling some of those services. And they've really got quite a blooming business here, at which they can really double down on now because they are the leader in this area. And really, if you have any thought that you might need a mission extension vehicle or some sort of servicing, there's one company that comes to mind right now,

and that is Northrop Grumman. So I feel like they are going to really use this to double down on these services and start selling a lot more of these. So I would not be surprised coming out of this to hear the sales of new mission extension vehicles, hear the sales of the first mission vehicles, hear the sales of the first mission extension pods, maybe some targets that they could use those robotic payloads that

will be flying on RSGS for other satellites. I'm really interested to see what comes out of this. But it feels like a really good example of, you know, the public-private partnership thing. You've got a company who has been successful so far in the early days of satellite servicing. You have a government organization that is interested in doing some technology demonstration, and you pair that together. This is the kind of stuff that we like to see. We like to see it in the launch side, where you have a company like SpaceX, who is doing so well in launch, and that's going to give them a leg up when the government needs to buy a launch on the cheap. Launch is also the market where the government

wants to see multiple providers, so they're willing to fund a not necessarily commercially viable launch provider in order to have that diversity in the supply base. Right now, we don't have that with satellite servicing. I could see a day if satellite servicing becomes a major staple of the space industry, that the government is incentivized to make sure there are two providers available. But right now, you have somebody with such expertise that it just makes sense to partner with them and push their opportunities forward, to push their services forward, and to also take advantage of that opportunity that it provides to an organization like DARPA to do some technology

demonstration that would otherwise be a much more involved task. They would have to be, like I said, overseeing all of that work that goes into proximity operations, navigation and guidance, rendezvous and dock, imaging, all of that stuff, they basically get for free by choosing Northrop Grumman for this re-award. And I do, I am hopeful, you know, I'm always skeptical of DARPA programs just generally. They don't have the best history when it comes to space. But given the fact that they've got such a leg up here with Northrop Grumman already, I am quite hopeful in this turning out. And I'm really excited the next couple years for satellite servicing, because we are seeing some economic viability with what Northrop Grumman

is offering today. And then we've got RSGS and Restore L hopefully flying soon to do some more of this. And that's not to mention the smaller companies. We've talked to Altia Space Machines on the podcast before about what they're hoping to do in the realm of satellite servicing. It just feels like such a vibrant part of the market that everyone's working on these different ideas and seeing which ones work out. And that's a lot of fun, especially for someone like me who likes watching this stuff. So that's kind of your big rundown on RSGS. I hope that was helpful for context. And that's really all I got for you today.

Thank you again to everyone who supports the show over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. As always, email me, Anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time, thank you all for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.